Famous for his hundreds of space paintings for book covers, magazines, movie posters (Star Wars, King Kong, Towering Inferno and others) and even GM car advertisements, Berkey's career has been a long and impressive one. He moves easily between personal works, favoring midwestern landscapes, to 'Americana' as subject matter for Brown and Bigelow calendars, to an equally highly personal view of space, painted with his impressionistic and wholly original style of expression. Berkey works in casein, the pigments for which he himself grinds, sometimes in comination with acrylics, and he works only from his own drawings. His amazing ability convinces us that huge spaceships are actually traveling through the voids, or hovering over densely populated space ports and cities, where movement, sight and sound are incorporated into a two-dimensional creation which seems plausible and real. In 1991, Berkey's best work was collected in his artwork Painted Space [Friedlander Publishing], and recently his science fiction and space paintings have been featured as part of the 'Pavilions of Wonder' group show at the Canton Museum of Art. His art has also been collected in two series of collectible cards, published by FPG.


( Berkey )