Mesozoic Art II – Marc’s review

If, like me, you struggle to keep up with the glut of quality palaeoart emanating from all corners of the world these days, then Steve White and Darren Naish have another book for you. The sequel to 2022’s Mesozoic Art (and spiritual successor to the earlier Dinosaur Art books), Mesozoic Art II, is a fatter-than-ever compendium of the work of no fewer than 25 palaeoartists (as opposed to the paltry 20 found in MA1). Whereas the leaps between Dinosaur Art, Dinosaur Art II and Mesozoic Art were huge, with each one piling on more and more experimentation, stylistic departures and artists, moving further and further from a mostly Paulian baseline, Mesozoic Art II feels more like a continuation of the first. As such, it replicates both the best and worst aspects of its predecessor in terms of format, even if the cadre of artists is all-new (for Mesozoic Art, anyway), and the calibre is universally superb.

It’s quite telling that the work of Bob Nicholls, a man whose art is utterly ubiquitous in British museums, is tucked quite inconspicuously towards the back of this book. In most other contexts, the work of Famous Bob would stand out a mile, but here it just slots in neatly among reams and reams of equally superlative work by other artists. It’s starting to become easy to take these awesome artworks for granted, page after page of stirring compositions of meticulously researched extinct animals nestled among lush flora or bestriding dramatic landscapes; running, resting, confronting, fighting. We’ve come an awfully long way from having just a handful of artists worldwide capable of producing art like this – it feels almost like there’s a whole army of Doug Hendersons now. (Not that there’ll ever really be more than one Doug Henderson. But you know what I mean.)

Fans of good old ultra-detailed hyper-realism are well catered for with works by the likes of Andrey Atuchin, Bill Unzen, Henry Sharpe , and Anthony J Hutchings, whose ‘Psittacosaur Rivalry’ piece graces the dust jacket. However, as with the first Mesozoic Art, that’s not the whole story; elsewhere, the likes of Natalia Jagielska, Stieven van der Poorten, Curtis Lanaghan and DJ Washington bring bright, bold colours and vibrant characterisation while remaining scientifically informed. In fact, it feels unfair to lump those artists together like that, since all they really have in common is their departure from a naturalistic style – they are otherwise each very different, and together bring a huge amount of variety to the book.

A particularly intriguing inclusion is Lewis LaRosa, whose work I paid special attention to after Jed Taylor (whose work featured in MA1) mentioned to me that he was especially interested in seeing it. It includes both absolutely stunning and highly detailed graphic novel work, depicting dinosaurs in a naturalistic light, alongside more fantastical and sci-fi scenarios involving dinosaurs fighting people. The latter may prove a controversial inclusion, but it’s worth noting that the dinosaurs are always informed by the latest science; JP knock-offs these most certainly aren’t. I was really impressed by it, and the superb print quality of this book helps show everything off all the more. You haven’t seen Frederic Wierum’s fighting allosaurs and Rudolf Hima’s sauropod colossi until you’ve seen them here. Once again, this is a book that greatly enhances the artists’ digital pieces where it might once have let them down.

Any downsides? Predictably, my main criticisms of this book are identical to those of the first, namely that I’d like a bit more to read. Captions are provided for each piece, succinctly explaining what animals are involved, the behaviours depicted and where the artist might have been a little…speculative. They’re to be commended for their efficiency and readability, but I still miss the old Dinosaur Art days where artists would be invited to comment more on their processes and thinking. The brief bios are fine, but I’d like to know more about the techniques, research and personalities behind the artworks. I’m always especially interested in hearing why an artist made this, that or the other decision when producing a work that’s so necessarily speculative. I guess we’ll have to try and get each one of them onto the podcast.

All that said, I’m well aware that, with 25 artists to get through, that probably would have resulted in a book with a notably longer production time and weighing enough to have warning stickers affixed to it. As it is, I’m quite happy with what we got, and unless you’re the ‘richer than astronauts’ type with a huge collection of original palaeoart (not that I’m at all envious of any such people whether or not they’re named David) this provides an excellent way of amassing a great wealth of palaeoart at a very reasonable price. You like palaeoart, right? Give it a go. (Just don’t be tempted to try and become a full-time palaeoartist yourself. They’ll warn you off that in the introduction…)