Richard Hescox was born in Pasadena, California in 1949 and spent his childhood there on the periphery of Hollywood and just over the mountains from Edwards Air Force Base where the X-15 rocket plane was making it’s initial assault on outer space.  He fondly remembers the frequent sonic booms from military jets overhead before they were prohibited from flying over the Los Angeles area neighborhoods.

From an early age these nearby distractions inspired Richard’s soaring imagination along with the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells and others, which he devoured, interspersed with the comic books of the day, then undergoing a Renaissance.  Early on, he began translating his imagination into drawings, which displayed a marked talent, encouraged by his teachers, and leading inexorably to the pursuit of an education in art.

In High School, Richard won a National Merit Scholarship to the college of his choice and picked The Art Center College of Design with it’s well earned reputation as one of the best art schools in the U.S.

After graduation from the Art Center “With Honors” He continued his “education” with a job at the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles learning much about nature and culture that would enrich the illustration career he was beginning to build. Starting with assignments from Marvel Comics, he branched out into many and varied fields of illustration.  As a book cover artist He worked for most of the major publishing houses that had Science Fiction or Fantasy lines including Daw, Del Rey, Signet, Baen, Bantam, Tor, Warner and Ace producing over 130 cover paintings.  Among these were many covers for the books of Marion Zimmer Bradley and the “Venus” series by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  (The latter had been a dream project of his since reading those novels in his youth.)   For the Hollywood film studios He created advertising art and production designs for “Swamp Thing”, “The Howling”, “The Philadelphia Experiment”, “E.T.”, “The Dark Crystal”, “The Fly”, “The Never-ending Story”, “Halloween 2”, and “The Time Bandits” among others.  For the computer games industry He has been an art director and conceptual designer for Microsoft Games Division, Sierra On-line, Wild Tangent, Dymanix and Zipper Interactive.  In this capacity He Art Directed the game “Rama” based on the novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee.  Numerous magazine illustrations, videocassette boxes and record albums also felt his touch.  Besides his many U.S. clients, publishers throughout Europe and Russia regularly make use of his images on books and magazines.

Richard is a winner of many awards in the field of Science Fiction and Fantasy art including The “Jack Gaughan Memorial Award” and the “Chesley” award from the Association of Science Fiction Artists.

With success in his profession Richard has turned in his spare time to creating fine art paintings, emerging directly from his imagination and personal aesthetic.  Unhindered by editorial and assignment related limits, these works soar to artistic heights which have elicited enthusiastic admiration from an ever widening field of art lovers.  Speaking of these paintings, writer and artist Paul Chadwick remarked: “Richard is now mining a vein that the English romantic realists of the late 1800s - J.W. Waterhouse, Arthur Hacker, Frank Dicksee, Herbert Draper, and others - first worked.  Softly painted oils of maidens, sometimes fantastical (sirens, tree nymphs, mermaids) in usually quiet scenes of antiquity, they obviously come out of a deep place in his psyche that yearns for rest, beauty, and mystery.  Other sources of his inspiration are the nonpareil American illustrator J.C. Leyendecker and Australian sensualist Norman Lindsay.”

The artwork of Richard Hescox has been exhibited at the ”Society of Illustrators” in New York City, at the “Delaware Art Museum”, at the “Canton Museum of Art” in Canton, Ohio and at The University of Maryland Art Gallery.