James
Spratt has sculpted a wide range of subjects during his rewarding career:
wild animals, nudes, science fiction heroes and creatures, portraits, African
wildlife, historical and prehistorical figures and many more.
Through the years, however, he has been consistently drawn
to the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs for inspiration. Perhaps his most
memorable ERB subjects are concentrated on his depiction of Jetan pieces
-- the game invented by ERB in the book,
Fellow ERB fan -- Dan Nadel -- has
shared a PDF file of excerpts from an article published by the European
art magazine BLAU discussing the A Princess of Mars art by our longtime
contributor James Killian Spratt. I had worked with James for many years
and spent countless hours (from 2000-2015) doing
ERBzine features on his JETAN (ERB's Martian Chess) sculptures and serializing
his graphic adaptation of ERB's A Princess of Mars in ERBzine.com.
Since Internet speeds and storage costs were more restrictive in those
early days the first images I displayed were smaller, but as we progressed
I increased the size and resolution of this online artwork.
Along the way I had contacted
numerous publishers with hopes of raising interest in print publications
of James' work, since I really believed in it. Such efforts, to our disappointment,
were without success. The stumbling block seemed to be the excessive and
exaggerated nudity in the images of this copyrighted material. Facebook
and other Web sources also had policies that restricted the display of
such nudity but fortunately they must have recognized the artistic quality
of what we were doing and ERBzine received no complaints from readers or
the Internet hosts.
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