Dave Seeley ’82 has always been an artist — and a self-described science fiction fanboy. In his recent collection, “The Art of Dave Seeley,” he calls himself a lifelong “image junkie,” a collector of everything from airbrushed album covers to comic books, from fine art to fashion magazines to fantasy illustrations. In elementary school, he impressed his classmates by filling notebooks with elaborate colored-pencil monsters. But he didn’t think “strong students” majored in art, so when he got to Rice, he applied himself to the more professional subject of architecture. Even here, however, surrounded by what Seeley called “the exotic cowboy culture of Houston,” he couldn’t stay away from comic book stores or the Montrose art shops that featured the kinds of airbrushed pop art he had grown up admiring. After earning his bachelor’s degree in architecture, with a minor in art and art history, then a Bachelor of Architecture degree, he left Rice to practice architecture in his native Boston. There, he writes, “I reconnected with a beautiful and brilliant college classmate who’d come to Harvard for law school” — Linda Bosse ’83. Early on in “a romance that’s lasted 27 years,” Bosse recognized that Seeley needed more art in his life. “One year, as a Christmas gift, she called my bluff and signed me up for a bronze-casting class,” Seeley recalled. “It was there that I realized my art-making itch needed some serious scratching.” Seeley was as good at designing buildings as he had been at drawing monsters. He was the lead designer on several building projects that won national awards. But, as he’d begun to realize, his heart wasn’t quite in it. In the mid-1990s, following a prestigious architecture fellowship that financed a five-month, around-theworld trip for Seeley and his wife, he made a daring leap from the structured world of architecture into the realm of fantasy, beginning his second career as a professional illustrator with commissions for a series of role-playing and collectible card games. Soon he was designing book jackets for science fiction and fantasy novels — including for one of the best-known and bestloved franchises of the genre: “Star Wars.” It was a homecoming of sorts for Seeley, who’d dreamed since the ’70s of seeing the view from inside the Millennium Falcon. Now, as an artist, he had the chance to explore that view by creating it. He describes the thrill of this opportunity in his book, in a chapter called “Star Wars,” which we’ve excerpted in the following pages. — Jennifer Latson
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