COMMISSIONS could be anything - an upside down crucifixion, a baby with two heads in a glass jar.

It's macabre, menacing and pays the mortgage.

In a perfect world Arnside artist Geoff Taylor would be painting wolves and deer.

First and foremost the guy who creates book covers for the likes of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a wildlife conservationist.

But there is a pension to plan for, bills to pay.

So Geoff says he had no option.

"I had to sell my soul," he says.

"I hate all this outrageous stuff.

It's total crap.

I should be painting nothing but wildlife.

Financially, it's not an option."

He has just been asked to design a cover for the band Death Metal.

"Think fury, chaos, war," came the instruction.

"It's another Apocalypse Now sort of job," groans the painter whose first order was for legendary Philip K.

Dick's classic book Counter Clock World.

Other massive names in science fantasy fiction, Katharine Kerr, Raymond E.

Feist, Robert Holstock, and Stephen Donaldson have seized on Geoff's amazing art work.

But he is a wolfman at heart, impassioned by Jerome Mercier's 14th century account of The Last Wolf.

Images of 60 mounted huntsman wielding lances and spears to slay the country's last beast on limestone cliffs at Humphrey Head haunt him.

Geoff has done his bit by supporting Wolf Watch UK.

He is desperate to do more.

Drawing is inherent.

As a child, Geoff obsessively produced stick men and women on every piece of blank paper he could find, including his mother's recipe books.

TV Sketch Club was a turning point.

Every time a kid's picture was shown they got a certificate and for every three there was a prize.

"I ended up with more than 50.

It got embarrassing.

My mother was going round saying our Geoff's had another picture on the telly."

School was an ordeal.

There was only art and sport - and a lot of truancy, spent in woods looking at the animals.

Predictably there was just one o' level, art, and a scholarship to Chesterfield College of Art, to do graphic design.

Advertising agencies followed, nothing glamorous, it was a slave trade for students, said Geoff.

One job lasted a week.

He didn't fare much better freelancing and was even dropped from a porno magazine's books.

"In my defence, it was because my pictures were not strong enough," he countered.

That was all in Nottingham, which he hated.

"I had to get out and found myself a shack on the North Yorkshire moors.

It had two skins of asbestos on its walls."

He made a pittance farm working, picking up odds and ends of jobs, until he was taken on as a dustbinman in Whitby.

"It was good, I got to know every dog and back yard in North Yorkshire, and had the occasional perk of getting something which had been thrown out."

The chequered career continued with jobs as a warehouseman and quarryman.

"The money was crap.

It was survival.

Work, tea, pub.

That was life."

It was the time of "amazing" record covers.

"Bands like Quicksilver Messenger and King Crimson were using incredible art work and I knew I could do it.

"My old ad portfolio had been destroyed, so I put another folder together and got a lift down to London, via the Nebworth Pop Festival."

In the Metropolis Geoff hawked his work around recording studios.

They all liked it and said they would ring.

They didn't.

"Hip Gnosis did the art work for Pink Floyd's recording studios and gave me my first job - a paperback cover for the great Philip K.

Dick.

"It was an incredible start.

A huge name for my first job.

Other big names followed."

Born in Lancaster, he returned to live in Arnside three years ago.

It coincided with learning to drive.

"My mother bought me a Ford Fiesta, until then it had been motorbikes and a Robin Reliant."

His house is surrounded by woodland and Geoff spends hours photographing fauna.

"I'm passionate about the environment," he explains.

Bread and butter comes from the likes of Games Workshop in Nottingham, specialists in fantasy war games.

Dwarfs, elves and goblins rule in a weird world in which Geoff is a reluctant inhabitant.

"My real world is dominated by wildlife.

It is where I belong."

He laments that there are no wolves left in England.

There is too much negative evolution going on, he says.

"It's not the animals, it's humans that create the problem."

Fittingly, his work went on show at Silverdale's Wolf House Gallery in December.

In June there will be an exhibition in Wigan.

"Painting gives me a living.

Everything else is about wildlife and conservation."