I was eagerly awaiting the release of Vision of the Hawk: The Art of Arik Moonhawk Roper for what felt like a very long time. I’ve been aware of his work for a long while thanks to my interest in stoner and doom metal, a scene in which he is a mainstay as a cover artist. His most famous image is no doubt the 2012 cover of Sleep’s Dopesmoker, which depicts a caravan of Fremen-like Weedians processing through an alien desert. I’ve got his art on albums from Earth, Kvelertak, High on Fire and more on my record shelf. I love them all and I was keen to see his work as body. Strange Attractor’s massive art book exceeded my expectations by miles (I’m pals with the fellows at Strange Attractor, but for real, that has very little to do with my reaction here).

Taken together, I was surprised at how quickly I stopped thinking of Roper’s art in the context of metal and started engaging with it as pure fantasy, and part of that genre’s larger illustrative tradition. I don’t know quite how to say it — it’s like his work has always been in the back of my head somehow. Page after page, I feel like I’m scraping past decades to the ur-source somehow. How does it seem so 21st century while also seeming to have been around since the ’70s? Is that the psychedelics making me feel that way? He’s out of time in the very best ways and while I bet most folks talk about Frazetta and Jone in the same breath, there’s a gnarliness here that reminds me a lot Bernie Wrightson, or at least reminds me of flipping through Wrightson’s A Look Back, where lurid color butts up against incredibly ink work. Unlike that tome, though, Vision of the Hawk is a gorgeously produced book. You really need to hold it in your hand to appreciate it — the matte paper gives Roper’s art a real richness that you lose in my copyphotos. A must own book for fantasy connoisseurs, no doubt.