Bloodstock Open Air Festival is proud to announce that founder and resident artist Paul Raymond Gregory has been selected for inclusion in the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson. The museum, dedicated to the art of visual storytelling, is located in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, California and was designed by architect Ma Yansong of MAD Architects. It opens to the public on 22 September 2026, eight years after its 2018 groundbreaking.

Paul’s dark, three panel masterwork The Designs of Melkor (1996-97), inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Silmarillion, is now on display in the museum’s 300,000 sq ft, spaceship-like building, standing alongside works by Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Andy Warhol and more. It is a rare honour for an artist who has spent five decades moving between fine art and the world of rock and metal, and who has spent 25 years building Bloodstock into the UK’s premier independent festival for rock and metal music.

Paul was already mixing paint on a canvas the size of a stage backdrop years before he became the man behind Saxon‘s Crusader in 1984, the first of what would become a legendary run of album artwork for the likes of Dio, Uriah Heep, Blind Guardian, and Molly Hatchet. In 2001, that same restless creative energy led him to found Bloodstock, the festival he and his family still run today, 25 years later.

The Lucas Museum is far from Paul’s first brush with serious exhibition. His Tolkien series toured through a Sotheby‘s arranged exhibition culminating at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, leading to an invitation to the Barbican in London in 1984. The complete series was later shown at L’Univers des Fées in Brittany, France, and in 2007 at the Waldemarsudde Museum in Stockholm, in monumental hand-carved frames. It is simply the latest, and largest, chapter in a story still being written. 

Since 2014, Paul has channelled that same conviction into Bloodstock itself, building the festival’s Rock and Metal (RAM) Gallery into a dedicated, purpose built space at the heart of the festival grounds at Catton Hall. The RAM Gallery is a proper exhibition structure, showcasing rock and metal inspired art in all its forms, from Paul’s own monolithic Tolkien pieces, decades of album cover originals, and Bloodstock art, to handcrafted instruments as functional art, with work from up and coming artists given a platform alongside genre icons. With Paul’s own work now hanging in one of the world’s most talked about new museums, Bloodstock invites art press, music media, and fans alike to see where narrative art meets metal culture first hand when the RAM Gallery returns August 5 – 8 for the 2027 festival.

“I never set out to end up in a museum. I set out to paint the stories that gripped me, Tolkien most of all, and to give metal album covers the same weight and craft as any other art form,” says Paul. “To have The Designs of Melkor hanging in George Lucas’s museum is a great honour and is beyond anything I ever imagined when I first put brush to canvas. It says something bigger too, that the art of metal, fantasy and storytelling belongs in these rooms just as much as anywhere else.” 

Bloodstock will announce more details on future RAM Gallery exhibitors and Paul’s work in the coming months. For the latest information on Bloodstock, visit bloodstock.uk.com.