Jon Arfstrom

Jon Arfstrom (November 11, 1928 – December 2, 2015) was an American artist of imaginative realism known for his fantastical works in the fantasy and horror genres, active both in the late pulp fiction era of the 1950s, with his Weird Tales cover art and interior illustration work, and then again in science fiction publishing in the 1980s, for his mature cover work, for which he received a Bram Stoker Award in 1994.

An accomplished watercolorist, Arfstrom combined his public life as a commercial artist, with its focus on Americana, with a private, surreal, imaginative world, expressed in his many notebooks and journals.

Early life Arfstrom was born in Superior, Wisconsin. His parents were immigrants from Sweden; his father, Fred Arfstrom, a painter and "jack-of-all-trades," his mother, Thyra Westlund Arfstrom, a chef. His early years were spent in the lake city of Duluth, Minnesota. Too young for service in World War II, Arfstrom lied about his age and went work on board the big Great Lakes freighters and excursion ships, where he "sold beverages and did portraits of passengers." By sixteen, the hard-working teenager was a freight foreman.

The couple weathered some financially difficult years while Arfstrom established himself as a commercial artist, independent of his science fiction work. He was hired as an advertisement illustrator for the Gamble-Skogmo company in 1950. This would establish the first of "two very different lines of artistic work that would remain as mostly-separate threads throughout the rest of his life."

Unfortunately for Arfstrom's early career as a freelance magazine artist, Weird Tales folded in 1954, a reflection of a more general decline in magazine sales in that genre in the post-war period.

Staff illustrator at Brown & Bigelow Arfstrom was hired as a staff illustrator by the Saint Paul, Minnesota publishing company Brown & Bigelow in 1956, where he continued with his portrait work and, in the earlier years, helped prepare Norman Rockwell’s paintings for publication on the company’s popular commercial calendars. Weird Tales (Jan 1952) Weird Tales (Jul 1952) Weird Tales (Sep 1953) Spacetrails #5 (1953) Etchings & Odysseys #3 (1983) The Devil Made Me Do It by Paul Dale Anderson (Miskatonic University Press, 1985) Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei (Fedogan & Bremer, 1989) Smoke of the Snake by Carl Jacobi (Fedogan & Bremer (1994) The Early Fears by Robert Bloch (Fedogan & Bremer, 1994) Don't Dream: The Collected Fantasy and Horror of Donald Wandrei (Fedogan & Bremer, 1997) Tales of the Unanticipated (Minnesota Science Fiction Society, Winter/Spring/Summer 1997) Kaldar: World of Antares by Edmond Hamilton (plus frontispiece, Haffner Press, 1998) The Vampire Master and Other Tales of Terror by Edmond Hamilton (Haffner Press, 2000) Swedish Lutheran Vampires of Brainerd by Anne Waltz (Sidecar Preservation Society, 2001) Scream Quietly: The Best of Charles L. Grant (PS Publishing, 2012

Gallery: cover art