Di FATE, Vincent

(1945-)

   US sf illustrator (name sometimes rendered DiFate). He was born in Yonkers, New York, and like many other sf illustrators attended the New York-Phoenix Institute. He began his career doing tv animation for Ralph Bakshi; his first professional sf illustration was for Analog (Aug 1969) and most of his magazine work has been for ASF. Many of his paintings have been for paperback book covers. His artwork, suprisingly impressionistic for someone who frequently works with technological subjects like spacecraft, is often moody and sombre. He was one of the NASA artists for the Apollo/Soyuz programme in 1975 and has worked for NASA since. He won the HUGO for Best Professional Artist in 1979 and has been nominated many other times. VDF lectures on art and is also well known for his occasional, interesting, long-running column about sf illustration, Sketches, from 1976 in the semiprozine ALGOL and in its surviving sister magazine SF CHRONICLE. A book of his work is Di Fate's Catalog of Science Fiction Hardware (1980) by VDF and Ian Summers.

   JG/PN

   See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.