Michael Whelan was born in 1950, in Culver City, California. Whelan received a B.A. in Painting as a President's Scholar from San Jose State University. He identifies M.D. Stewart and Raymond Brose as his "primary mentors and influences" during his training. He also attended the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles for a short period of time. 

For the past two decades, Whelan has been known primarily as one of the world's top illustrators of speculative fiction, having completed more than 350 cover illustrations for major science fiction works. In this field his hundreds of outstanding paintings have been the subject of four books, and have won him an unprecedented fifteen Hugo awards. A self-described Imaginative Realist, he has earned an enormous, loyal fan

base for his dreamlike paintings which combine brilliant

classical technique with wholly original, often spiritually symbolic, subject matter.
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