The “Tortured Artist” Inside All Of Us
Created by the Nautilus Marketing team
We’re all guilty of judging a book by its cover on occasion, but for Jennifer Bruce it’s a full-time job. Bruce, an award-winning artist, has created the cover illustrations for a slew of fantasy novels. Bringing the characters, story, and tone of a book to life with a single image takes a lot of careful work, and it shows in her art.
Bruce’s intricate illustrations are equal parts magic and realism, weaving together the natural world with the supernatural. That’s why she was the ideal candidate to illustrate our cover story for Issue 51. In it, biologist Zhengyang Wang shares a firsthand account of his quest through the Himalayas to unravel the mysteries of a prized Tibetan cash crop—a parasitic fungus that hijacks the brains of caterpillars.
Bruce was kind enough to take time away from her studio in Michigan to answer our questions about science fiction, her feelings on the “tortured artist” trope, and the fraught role of AI in art.
What drew you to the arts and how did you decide pursuing illustration was the path you wanted to take?
My path through college was a long and winding one. I had no idea what I wanted to do straight out of high school, so instead of getting a degree in roughly four years I wandered through a couple of terms at a university and several exploratory classes at a
