Lee Brown Coye (July 24, 1907 – September 5, 1981) was an American artist.
Coye is probably best remembered for his black-and-white illustrations for pulp magazines and horror fiction, but he produced a variety of works in other media.
Biography
Coye was born in Syracuse, New York, and as a young man lived in nearby Tully. He spent his entire life in the Central New York area.
He and his wife, Ruth, lived in Syracuse for many years where Coye's activities included teaching adult art classes; working under the Works Progress Administration to paint a mural in the Cazenovia High School in 1934 (since destroyed); advertising for the WSYR Broadcasting System in upstate New York, producing a variety of commissioned works.
The Coyes settled in Hamilton, New York, in 1959 when Lee went to work for Sculptura, a small company that reproduced antique sculptures. The move to Hamilton allowed Coye to fulfill his ambition of returning to a small town and maintaining his own art studio.
Coye was almost entirely self-taught as an artist, and his entire life was devoted to art-related work. As a young man, he attended one semester of night art classes, but his artistic knowledge and abilities came from many years of work and a thorough study of nature. His astute knowledge of body parts developed from his studies of anatomy and his work as a medical illustrator. He spent time attending operations and autopsies, thus becoming extremely familiar with the human body assembled or not.
Recurring motifs
One recurring feature in Coye's work is the motif of wooden sticks, often in latticework-like patterns. This was inspired by a 1938 discovery in an abandoned farmhouse.
Coye had returned to the North Pitcher, New York, area where he spent much of his childhood. While wandering deep in the woods, Coye discovered an abandoned farmhouse. Boards and pieces of wood which had been set perpendicular to one another surrounded the site. Neither inside nor out could Coye find an explanation for the presence of these crossed sticks. In the years following, Coye remained interested in the significance of his discovery.
When Coye returned to the site in 1963, there was nothing left of the building or the sticks (the area had suffered severe flooding), and he never found out why the sticks were there or who it was that had arranged them in such a manner. Because of the strangeness of the entire experience, these forms never left Coye, and they appear in many of his paintings and illustrations.
The incident also inspired Coye's friend Karl Edward Wagner to write the award-winning story "Sticks". A four-page portfolio of Coye's work accompanies the printing of Wagner's story in Gahan Wilson, ed. First World Fantasy Awards. NY: Doubleday, 1977, (between pages 168 and 169).
The crescent moon was an early Coye motif in paintings and illustrations. The whale became a later signature motif. Coye fashioned wooden sculptures, silver pendants and pins, engravings, drawings, and a large painting of the whale. One very fine example is in the Morrisville State College Library collection the pine "Moby-Dick" sculpture created in 1965.
Illustrator of the macabre
Coye's fame as an illustrator of the macabre developed as a result of his drawings for three horror anthologies edited by August Derleth in the early 1940s, Sleep No More (1944), Who Knocks (1946), and The Night Side (1947). This subsequently led to additional work for Weird Tales, a popular pulp magazine. Coye's work first appeared in the March 1945 issue of Weird Tales, illustrating the story 'Please Go Way and Let Me Sleep" by Helen Kasson. This tale gave Coye the chance to show dead bodies in various states of decomposition.<ref>Gahan Wilson, "Lee Brown Coye: An Appreciation, in Wilson, ed. First World Fantasy Awards, NY: Doubleday, 1977, pp. 256-57.</ref> From 1945 to 1952, his covers and interior work, in a long and fruitful association with the magazine, captured images of horror and the supernatural. A review of Pulp Macabre: The Art of Lee Brown Coye's Final and Darkest Hour said his work for Weird Tales produced "some of the magazine's greatest covers and as well as some of the most memorable illustrations to ever appear in pulps". In the 1960s, Coye's work appeared in such magazines as Fantastic and Amazing.