“It’s a pleasant, romantic scene,” says Mead.
Which is, actually, true of most of Mead’s work. Whether it’s the depiction of a colossal racetrack for mechanical beasts, an idyllic vertical farm, or a future Rolls Royce, the driving force is relationship—the relationship of landscape to light, the relationship of people to landscape, the relationship of people to objects, and, ultimately, each other.
In “City on a Megabeam,” a 1983 painting included in the Progressions exhibit, we find a fantastically detailed extension of a city built up from the ground into the sky like a superhighway onramp. It climbs up over suburbs, water, rock, and scrub. City lights twinkle in the distant flatlands, golden sun reflects in the bay. It is breathtaking view, seductive and emotive, but quiet. In one corner of the foreground, two construction workers stare out from the windows of a site.
Their faces are hidden behind smooth helmets, but their bodies tell a story of watchfulness and yearning. They are separate and eager to return. Their diligence is palpable but so is their aloneness.
‘The best way to predict the future is to create it’ probably had Mead in mind.
This level of emotional richness sits in stark contrast to the cool remove of other artists like Ron Cobb, who have also captured the hearts of science fiction fans around the world. And there is no richer example of it than the work that won Mead his official title as “visual futurist.”
Mead was hired to design vehicles for Blade Runner, but he did what he has always done: he immersed his transportation ideas within a story, and, essentially, painted his way into the movie. By the end, his hand could be felt on everything, from the objects Harrison Ford held to the dripping city streets he walked.
“The movie industry has really changed since then, moving toward one-stop shopping,” says Mead. “As an independent, I might get hired to design one thing, like when they asked me to do the Mask-Maker for Mission: Impossible III, because they wanted something that would look like it could actually work. But usually the same shop does the sets and the props. Blade Runner was different.”
Mead based Blade Runner’s dystopian Los Angeles on the Philippines, and anywhere else objects are forced to live beyond their expiration date. The resulting aesthetic is dense and ramshackle. Layers of jurassic technology are buried under a modern patchwork, with an internal logic that is, at once, completely rational and wholly tied to Ridley Scott’s particular vision of the future.
By contrast, the “Light Cycles” Mead designed for TRON are meant to be computer programs. They are smooth and clean, essentially intuitive computer icons rendered in three dimensions. While his elegant “Solar Sailors,” which traveled along “data transmission beams,” resemble highly stylized dandelion spores, one of nature’s more successful windborne cargo carriers.
Those two movies made Mead something of a sensation in Japan, where illustrators can become rock stars. In the mid ‘80s, he did two big, one-man shows there and sold over 25,000 copies of his new book, Oblagon, in just a little over a month. It wasn’t long before he was doing designs for toys, TV, and anime. Since then, a devoted following has spread around the globe, from Russia to Columbia, and anywhere else people like to future surf.
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