Above: Patrick Woodroffe’s LP cover design for Greenslade’s “Time & Tide for No Man”.
Patrick James Woodroffe was born on 27 October 1940, in Halifax, West Yorkshire. He became a full-time artist in 1972; the year in which he gave an exhibition of his paintings, etchings and related works at the Convent Garden Gallery, in London.
In 1979, Woodroffe provided illustrations for Pentateuch of the Cosmogony: The Birth and Death of a World, (later shortened to ‘The Pentateuch’), a joint project with the symphonic rock musician Dave Greenslade.
The Pentateuch purports to be the first five chapters of an alien Book of Genesis. The album consisted of two-discs by the band Greenslade, and a 47-page book of Woodroffe’s illustrations. The record sold over 50,000 copies between 1979 and 1984. The illustrations were shown at the World Science Fiction Convention, at Brighton’s Metropole Hotel in 1979.
- In 1983 Woodroffe created an album sleeve for the rock band Pallas, as well as related logos for merchandise. The same year saw Woodroffe creating art (including representations of a Snark – a subject traditionally taboo for an artist to do) for composer Mike Batt’s 1984 musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark.
- The 1980s also saw another Patrick Woodroffe exhibition, Catching the Myth, at Folkestone’s Metropole Arts Centre (1986), which featured 122 pieces selected from 21 years of work.
- In 1989, he prepared the conceptual art used in the film “The Never Ending Story II.”
Woodroffe lived with his family in Cornwall until his death, after succumbing to a long illness, on 10 May, 2014.
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