Dialectic

A classical phase is characterized by focus on the perfection of the human form as athletic and beautiful, and there's also a strong focus on the supremacy of masculine force. The classical is profoundly conservative - emphasis is placed on traditional family values, patriarchy and masculinity. But following the classical inevitably comes the other side of the coin - a decadent phase. The aspects that were swept under the rug rise into the spotlight to get their due - these are the liberal values - we now see the failures of hyper-masculinity and place emphasis on femininity. Classical Greece was followed by Hellenism, and the classical Renaissance by the Baroque.  

I place Frazetta as the classical founder of fantasy art, and Jeffrey Jones as his decadent counterpart. 

In the case of the art periods I mentioned,  centuries passed between them, but Jones and Frazetta were contemporaries, with a brief period where Frazetta stood alone forging the new paradigm while Jones studied what he was doing and got his artistic legs under him. So fascinatingly, both sides of the dialectic were operating simultaneously. It was this dialectic between them that animated the fantasy art scene of the 60's/70's and made it so vital and interesting. 

Kent Williams is the third figure I discuss in relation to this dialectic, and let me explain why. Of course there were many followers of both Frazetta and Jones, most choosing one side or the other of the dialectic to champion, and some of them were excellent artists in their own right. I personally love the work of many of them, but only Williams grabbed my attention in the same visceral way as the two primary movers of this dialectic. And keep in mind it's the dialectic itself I'm discussing here, not the merit of individual artists. Also I'm freely weaving in my own thoughts about my growth as an artist, and to me personally these 3 represent important milestones in my development. 

I discovered Frazetta when I was around 14 or 15 - going into high school in other words.. the perfect time for it. And Jones immediately afterward. So to me the 60's/70's fantasy art scene doesn't fee like a historical or dead period, it was vital and alive and still going strong when I was in my formative adolescence. Then at the very moment of my graduation (metaphorically speaking) in 1980 it all crashed to an abrupt halt. Frazetta had his first stroke and took some time to learn to paint with his left hand, but it never looked as good again. Something else shifted profoundly too - in popular music and movies the 60's and 70's was a renaissance of humanism (just as in fantasy painting), but the 80's was the beginning of a whole different epoch of shallow spectacle. Humanity and warmth and thoughtfulness were out, and in came explosions, steroid pumping freaks of nature, and countless sub-genres of rock music that all seemed to cater to the new extremism. I think it's telling that the music of the 60's and 70's is now called Classic Rock, and what followed was Alternative (quite literally an alternative to the classical).  

I got caught up in it myself - though not until the 90's. Not sure that's really part of this entry though - I'll probably cover it elsewhere. Anyway - back to Williams.

He's in a sense the central figure in this dialectic for me as an aspiring art student who wants to move through these particular phases. I was a kid when I discovered Frazetta and Jones, and my reaction to them was "Awwww - COOOOOOL!!!! " But I discovered Williams in the 80's sometime (not sure anymore exactly when - somewhere between '82 and '84 I believe) by which time I was beginning to become a more serious art student myself, and I saw him as someone I could emulate. I definitely understood right off the bat that he had grown from the fertile ground of the Frazetta/Jones dialectic. As I said 2 paragraphs ago, it was a whole new era in the 80's, by now Warren was no longer publishing (one of the main companies constantly publishing the work of Frazetta and several similar cover artists, and my monthly fix of excellent horror comics drawn by the incredible Spanish Invasion artists). But Marvel was sort of following suit and was publishing a deluxe large glossy magazine called Epic Illustrated, which took advantage of the new advances in printing technology to allow a much more painterly look in full color comic/graphic novel work. These same advances would later fuel Image Comics, one of the big paragons of shallow spectacle in 80's extremism, but with Epic Illustrated and later the line of Epic Comics Marvel really was pushing the envelope, experimenting and giving a huge amount of respect to artists many of whom were raised on the fantasy art of the 60' and 70's. Of all of them Williams was the most 'artsy', employing bold bravura brushwork and working in many different media, all of which he had seemingly mastered and always doing exciting things. Like Jones before him, he was an experimenter and supremely committed to his artistic integrity - when his experiments worked he really slammed it out of the ballpark, but often things just didn't gel quite right. But he really stuck to his guns and refused to fall back on more ordinary techniques that would have proven safer but far less exciting. So I don't consider him an always successful artist - I often feel like he's just trying to be too artsy and bravura, and sometimes I have to groan and think "Ok, here we go again.. ". But I was always excited to see what he had been doing and where he was headed artistically, because it was clear he was growing and moving into new territory. I suppose thats one of the really exciting things about him - so many artists in comics/graphic novels or fantasy art had long ago settled on their formula and never ventured from it. But Williams treated his comic work - hell every outing, as a new chance to push his techniques and try new things. It was clear he was using the graphic novel and comic book media as sort of sketchbooks - getting loads of experience and pushing his technique constantly in new directions. 

He later corroborated these findings of mine in some interview I read somewhere by saying that everything he had done so far was only the beginning - and then he launched his career as a fine art painter. 

If Frazetta is Classical and Jones is Hellenistic/Baroque, then Williams is a Modernist. Maybe a post modernist. I read somewhere that he had studied under Jeffrey Jones and lived near him, used to visit his studio, and the influence was plain to see. Jones had emulated Klimt and Schiele, Vermeer, post-impressionist and Brandywine School techniques, and now Williams emulated Schiele and many other Modernists, with a distinct preference for expressionism. 

I was profoundly excited by his work - I felt like it was something that had grown from the same artistic influences I had loved all through adolescence, but had moved beyond them to something that didn't feel as - embarrassing. I mean, if you tell someone you're a painter and then you haul out pictures of barbarian warriors and super sexy vixens, I think most people would have to stifle a little laughter, unless of course they're into the same stuff (these days of course most people are - things were different back in the 70's and 80's). Somehow Williams' work felt a lot more like serious artistic exploration while still being exciting and playful at the same time. This was exactly what I wanted to do. 

I was getting pretty decent at drawing (not as good as I thought I was, but starting to develop some skill at rendering nice surfaces and shading). And suddenly I decided I wanted to do what Kent Williams was doing - so I started distorting and trying to be all expressionistic. Heh - well, I had a lot of fun with it anyway, but it wasn't working for me. In later years I would come to understand that before you can distort the human figure you must understand the human figure - learn the classical skills before you can start to break the classical rules. And before you can express yourself freely in paint with bold bravura brushwork etc, you have to learn how to actually paint first. I had learned in  Art History that all the great modernist/expressionist painters were all classically trained. It's how you learn to effectively use the principles of art - and once you learn them well enough then you can start to freely express yourself and get as crazy as you want. Certainly Williams wouldn't be able to do what he does if he didn't know anatomy and figure drawing. 

So I realized what I need to do is get myself into a classical figure painting period. Learn anatomy and figure drawing/painting - learn how to render figures in environments effectively - learn about composition and color and paint handling and all of it. There was only one problem - it was now the 90's and I was deeply into what I call my Alternative period. 

I was going through my rebellious bohemian phase, and as much as I still loved Classic Rock and 70's movies etc, I was excited about the Alternative music scene with all its angst and thunder. I found it very hard to work up interest in cracking down to the books and learning anatomy and what I considered all the boring stuff (classical principles of art) - I thought I had already got that all under control previously (I was wrong). I was all worked up, considered myself some kind of Kurt Cobain of visual art, hurling my soul onto the canvas all bloody and raw. It was all about a sort of punk mentality - to hell with study and rules and all that, just thrash around a lot and make noise and be rebellious, right? 

Fortunately before this Alternative Fever gripped me I had bought a lot of books on anatomy and figure drawing - chief among them the Burne Hogarth Dynamic series and Robert Beverly Hale's Master series. I even did an initial readthrough of each series, just to begin to wrap me head around all the new concepts - the forms in the human body that I never even knew existed and such. I did a few drawings trying to absorb the knowledge, but didn't get too far before I slipped into my Alternative phase and put all that stuff away. It took many years before I outgrew that. Decades actually. I did lapse out of the Alternative period a dozen or so years ago, but by that time I was deeply invested in stop motion animation and decided it subsumed all my other skills (drawing, painting, sculpture, writing, etc) and that now I no longer needed to do any of those since I was doing the one art form that rolls them all up into a big ball. I also felt like if I got involved in doing a bunch of other artistic projects I was wasting time I needed to put into stopmotion. But I was going a little crazy, I really needed to stretch my artistic wings again and do something else. Which brings us up to when I started this blog. 

My plan now is to spend some time learning to paint similarly to Frazetta and Jones (learn Classical and Decadent) - which I'm accomplishing now, and then I'll cut loose and start to try my hand at some distortion and more modern stuff like what Williams does. I don't want to really emulate him, or to copy his style or anything, in fact at this point I can't even begin to say what my art will look like by that point or what's going to become important to me. I'm entering into new territory and it's exciting to see where it's going to take me. 

Thoughts on my work so far and what I need to accomplish next

In approximately a month now since I've unlocked the secrets of photoshop and really learned how to use it, I've nearly completed 2 paintings (Longbow and  Bemused {working title}). I feel like I've done some pretty amazing work on both, and it feels like I'm still expanding into this exciting new territory that's opened up for me since discovering I can actually paint now. I'm getting loads of invaluable experience by doing Bemused as such a detailed landscape painting, but I need to get away from that stuff in order to make my work look more like fantasy painting. 

In fact that's my goal now - to figure out what elements are important in the fantasy painting genre and learn how to accomplish that look myself.

Here are the factors I already know I need to work on -

• going beyond local color. 
• Developing a powerful but simple composition without extraneous details, and with elements simplified through devices like silhouette. 
• Poses and proportioning of human figures. 
• Limiting of facial expressions and gesture - I don't want my fantasy paintings to look like snapshots of people smiling and enjoying life like a commercial or bored consumers waiting patiently like in a Gurney painting. They must be active and dynamic - these are narrative paintings and the same rules apply as in narrative storytelling - the main character must be dynamic and not a passive observer or pushover. 

At least these rules apply in a Frazetta/ Classical fantasy painting world - in Jones' work not so much. After all, Krenkel did call him the Master of the Meaningless Gesture! His male heroines frequently just stand or pose mysteriously in some sort of thick soupy atmosphere. The work is more about form and color and mystery and atmosphere than about action.

I want to emulate both Frazetta and Jones - or rather try out their techniques and approaches - hopefully without copying their styles. 

2nd character begun

Sexuality and masculine aggression in fantasy art

Fantasy art of the 50's - 70's was largely responding to the new availability/increased acceptance of porn magazines like Playboy and the more in-your-face sexuality they promoted - and of course even some of the much sleazier magazines that trailed in it's wake. 

Frazetta's world was adolescent male fantasy - violence and sexuality presented in unrealistic terms like the way they are seen by a teenager surging with hormones. Bulging muscles and rigid  sinews, steely swords, monstrous opponents bulging with a savage gleam in the eye, incredibly voluptuous women as prizes to be won and dominated or as frightening sorceresses to be fled from or sometimes as warriors themselves, but never the physical equal of the male warriors. It's a very conservative view on sex and aggression - a man's world, where women are to be protected and cherished and treated as sexual playthings and they like it that way. This actually is what the world is like for a hypermasculine man like Frazetta- it's the world they really live in. And lots of women do as well and like it that way, consider liberal men weak and ineffectual. 

Corben followed much the same tradition, but his world was a caricature of Frazetta's - his ultimate symbol being Den, a skinny pre-sexual 13 year old boy suddenly transformed into a bulging veiny erection of a warrior surrounded by bouncy bimbos and strange masculine viragos seemingly obsessed with castration fever. But then Corben really can't be called an artist in the same sense as the rest - he's an underground comic book artist leaning toward caricature and spoofing the muscle head genre, but with an uncanny ability for it almost rivaling some of the masters. But his work doesn't seem to express his inner world in the same way as the others - it's mostly just neat stuff demonstrating his virtuoso skills and fascinations. I suppose exposing his fascinations does count as expressing his inner world, and yet that inner world seems pretty shallow in comparison to the painters on this list. Corben paints too, but his paintings are illustrations and never serve as fine art in their own right - they work well on slick paperback covers or graphic novels but not on canvas framed on a gallery wall. Williams would be the strongest fine artist of the group, following in the footsteps of the second strongest Jones, but surpassing him in many respects. Frazetta did paint like a renaissance master but there's something so puerile and embarrassing about his near-pornographic superhero-style work that makes it look foolish in a gallery. 

Jeffrey Jones however was a completely different story. He didn't objectify women - he internalized femininity. It could be hard to tell the women from the men in his paintings - both were somewhat androgynous. Well, the men were anyway. Tall, slender and graceful, lanky and raw-boned - just like he was. Like Frazetta, most of his male characters seemed like self-portraits, but opposed to Frazetta's ultra-conservative hypermasculinity his world was rife with liberal values - equality, non-objectification, non-violence. His males were like Pre-Raphaelite male heroines, and as it turned out so was he - later in life he became a cross-dresser and then a transsexual and changed his name to Catherine Jeffrey Jones. This explains so much about his art - the most central symbol of which was that iconic cover for his book featuring an anima figure of a beautiful woman enveloping and enwrapping his self-figure in her arms and thick sensual hair.  

And then there's Kent Williams. One of the superstars of the next generation - but who escaped becoming part of the copycat crowd or the caricature dark-malicious gigantic warriors with ridiculously huge axes scene. He grew up apparently next door to Jeffrey Jones, and was an artistic prodigy in childhood as far as I can tell, who would frequently hang out in Jeff's studio and get art lessons from him. Jones had himself begun by absorbing and copying Frazetta's style but quickly broke free and found his own artistic voice. Williams began by doing very Jones-like paintings I believe, but quickly broke free and began to express his own very individualistic style. 

What's his stance on sexuality and aggression? A lot harder to define than the rest. The 60' /70's fantasy art scene was the first to openly treat porn as a valid subject - Williams was part of the second generation, and personally he seems not to present women as sex objects to be leered at and won in combat, but in a much more nuanced and realistic way. Just like real life, it does include elements of objectified sexuality - that's a fact of life for all of us after all and can't be escaped - we will always have urges and sometimes they overwhelm us. That's how hormones operate - in a sweeping tide that rises suddenly and swamps us; turns us into howling mad beasts of passion and stupidity. Then in the aftermath they recede and leave us dazed and weak, confused about what just happened. This is the part males are forced to play in the endless comedy of reproduction we call life. 

Williams is a studly Asian man, and fills his studio with equally attractive friends both male and female that he draws and paints as part of his normal daily life. His paintings of women never feel like porn, rather they're like real people - a confusing mix of attractiveness and sexuality with other often conflicting qualities - sometimes even ugliness or disaffectation. He doesn't make puerile adolescent fantasy porn, but he also refuses to cleanse his work of the very real and conflicting urges and often ambiguous emotions that accompany them and that follow them. Sexual desire is very real and one of the most primal forces in human existence, and it brings a host of confusing and conflicting emotions and thoughts. These all seem to be fair game in his artistic world, but are not the totality of it - I'm just concentrating on the role of sexuality and it's depiction in this article.

Williams in some ways makes it hard to use simple language in these articles - I keep referring to 70's fantasy art and then mentioning him as a next-gen proponent of it - be really he's never been a fantasy painter in the sense the others were. As far as I know Williams has never painted a paperback cover, a barbarian, or anyone wielding a sword, at least in a fantasy setting. Personally his stance on violence is complex, as is his stance on sexuality. I do recall seeing a painting he did featuring himself in Samurai armor - but he was far from an avenging hero or great powerful warrior - instead the armor seemed to obliterate his humanity, to hide it and weigh heavily on it. Many of his paintings deal with his heritage as a Asian man and how he feels about traditional roles, which I assume are pretty strictly enforced by earlier generations (possibly including his parents? Don't know). So, it seems he's expanding on what I said Jones was doing - commenting on the themes revealed in Frazetta's iconic artwork. Following after Jones he seems to have been much more sophisticated about it from the beginning - probably facilitated by his studies of Jones' work, or possibly they even discussed it outright, I have no idea. 

How does Fritz Lieber depict sexuality in his writing, and how Robert E Howard? Howard of course the creator of Conan - Frazetta's doppleganger and most central and perfect subject. Howard's world was very much like Frank's - he must have been a man's man or at least envisioned itself that way, and Conan reflected that. A man must be strong - defeat all opponents, not take any crap and must know how to deal with women. Everything depends on his reputation as a macho man, and if that suffers then he's defeated and shamed. Lieber was different in large measure, though he sometimes did let his fantasy slip into very adolescent porn mode. In his world though it wasn't necessary for men to be iron-hard masculine dictators smashing all opponents and dominating women fiercely. 

Primordial

A selection of Frazetta images illustrating his penchant for simple abstract forms done in what appears to be colorful swirling gasses:

What makes these paintings what I call primordial? A combination of elements. For one the characters are stripped of anything superficial - no emotions other than fierce, grim, or maybe astonished. No social conventions or trappings of modern society such as mass produced objects, no signs of consumerist culture, no social order such as police - this is primitive existence - Man against either Man, Monster or Nature. There's no detail - everything is rendered as extremely simple forms - the figures really look like mannikins. No textures or patterns, though occasionally for certain types of animals the patterning is so important it needs to be included (like a leopard). But you'll notice, at least in the work of the three artists I concentrate on, even pattern isn't done illusionistically, it still shows brush marks - the hand of the artist at work. These pieces make it clear they were produced by hand by a talented artist, no surface polish or tricks to produce anything resembling photorealism the way Boris and others like to do. There's a definite preference for certain types of surfaces or materials - not a lot of shiny stuff which would tend to recall modern materials. Even when there's metal it's done as if it's hand forged rather than chrome-plated machine-finished mirror0surfaced metal polished to perfection.

The primordial is not naturalistic, it's symbolic. Backgrounds do not imitate nature, they're stages for dream dramas, arranged by the artists specifically to accent the action of the piece and to suggest the sense f primordial landscape.

But there are also certain painting/drawing techniques that contribute strongly to the primordial look of these works. Just a quick rundown - I plan to go into greater detail in future installments:

No detailing - things are rendered as simple bold forms broken down into light and dark shapes which are then painted in swirling colors that suggest a thick soupy atmosphere.

I'm nearly finished with the digital painting I call Bemused (probably to be called Red Fish or Devilfish on completion), and yesterday morning when walking out of my bedroom (still the storage room) I knocked over a pile of books and Frazetta prints (old calendar/book pages glued to cardboard in the Let's Start a Framing/Mounting Business days). In picking them up I got a quick look at a bunch of his work, and was really struck by just how abstract and primordial they are, which my work is not AT ALL!! 

Then this morning I noticed the top edge of one of the prints visible - a watercolor with a blonde girl lying in a field with several wolves sitting next to her. What immediately struck me when all I could see were the tops of several wolf heads was how completely my own drawing approach was inspired by his work. And it got me to thinking - 

Just how primordial do I want to go? I always assumed I'd be a really good painter one day, and also that my work would be somehow primordial like Frazetta's, Jeff Jones' etc. - but this painting sure isn't going that way. Longbow sort of is, but then it's also picking up some residual and unwanted Frazetta style and pose. His have what looks like glowing colorful gasses swirling through the background and even the figures, and it obliterates everything superficial to the primordial - what's left is a very stripped-bare figure facing forces of nature with naked will and courage. That's in Frank's work - in Jones' it's more like a psyche being buffetted by winds of inner turmoil or occasionally embraced by inner harmony and grace. Williams has something similar - but his figures aren't stripped all the way to the essential - they still include elements of social life and family, which in his artistic world are essential. And it's there in St. John's work too - a move toward the primordial but focused more an Adventure In Faraway Exotic Worlds.

Similar images by Jeffrey Jones:

So where should I strive to fit in? What's essential in my world? 

As I've been doing all along, let me start by examining how the authors they've illustrated have handled the same type of issues - R E Howard's Conan was primordial, Burroughs' John Carter more Exotic Adventure in Faraway Worlds, but what about Fritz Lieber (the author I most want to illustrate - this entry is aimed at helping my find my own approach)? 

Fafhrd and the Mouser aren't really primordial - thought at times they become it for part of an adventure. Their world is definitely exotic and faraway, but it's also whimsical and a bit surreal, and a reflection of our own for the wry humor elements. Probably the main element is their enduring and mighty friendship - warm, quirky, and very human. This is not primordial! It's what formed the basis of my Tony and Kurt/Beastseeker stories. There's also the whimsical and creative use of flowery Shakespearian language, one of Lieber's best assets. And something that would be considered extraneous and superficial in a Conan novel.

And by KWMS:

And finally a drawing by unknown artist exemplifying the same technique:

Note - this drawing only demonstrates the technique of rendering the image in shapes of light and dark and obliteration of most details - otherwise this work is not primordial, it's more of a costume drama piece with trappings firmly setting it in a particular time period,
and the characters enjoy a wide range of facial expressions and social conventions. These are definitely not primitive humans facing naked Nature with only /courage and Will - they're upper class citizens moving through their social melieu

I think that's why I've moved (semi-consciously) in a direction more akin to Golden Age magazine illustration as opposed to paperback covers of the 60's and 70's. More Howard Pyle than Frazetta. One of the best things I came up with is that wry grin that characterizes Fafhrd, which led me to Anthony Kiedis as the model for him. It's his facial expressions/body language and larger-than-life whimsical humor that make him Fafhrd. And try as I might, I just can't for the life of me see any Frazetta character (or Jones, or Williams for that matter) grinning like that! I'm also going into a good deal of naturalistic detail like an early Renaissance painting - rather than the isolated figure surrounded by swirling vapors. And I like it!! It led to a crisis because this is not at all how I always envisioned myself painting - I saw myself being much more Primordial. And I do want to do some of that - in some way anyway. Like I said, sometimes Faf and the Mouser become primordial. 

But one thing to consider - if I do move more toward that swirling vapor thing then my work would look very dated and derivative. Its the hallmark of every Frazetta clone as well as his highly talented compadres. It's sort of like those elements of Prog Rock that now sound silly and dated, even though in so many ways its good qualities still stand head and shoulders above any type of music made since. I don't want my work to look like it belongs airbrushed on the side of a '77 Chevy van! 

And yet I feel it's vitally important for me to do some paintings featuring the swirly vapor stuff. It's not only the way I always envisioned my art to look eventually, whenever I finally got good, but it's one of the essential fixtures of fantasy art - at least the Frazetta lineage. You even see a variation of it in Williams, and he makes it his own - so that's how I need to proceed. Do it a few times, learn how it's done, and then let it evolve into something that's not Frazetta-derivative. 

Lineage: Frazetta > Jones > Williams

A word about these articles - take them with a grain of salt:

In these articles, I'm simply freely stating my own thoughts and opinions - I don't claim to know enough to make definitive statements, I haven't done meticulous research, and these are not meant to be unbiased journalistic pieces, but rather my own very personal views and observations concerning the art that's important to me as I grow and develop as an artist myself. In fact I have a very bad memory and a tendency to occasionally re-write history a bit to make a better narrative of it, so take it all with a grain of salt. I'm not interested in arguing any of the points I make and feel no need to since I'm not posting these entries publicly but only in my own personal journal which I share with a few friends. So don't think of this as me making definitive statements as a historian or art scholar or anything, but more like visiting in my studio and getting my own personal take on the topics I'm interested in.

Original intro:

This morning I wrote up a quick draft of a partial paper on fantasy art of the 60's/70's and beyond, focusing on depictions of sexuality and masculine aggression. Now I want to do a more personal paper looking at artistic differences/similarities especially in relation to my own efforts to paint in a similar way. 

With Frazetta was born a particular way of immediately apprehending/conceiving a powerful composition with a figure in extreme action of some kind with a minimal, almost abstract background not oriented on details or naturalism, but serving mainly to give form to a certain force flowing through the figure and animating his environment. In Frazetta's case this was a very masculine force, asserting itself through aggression and strength and will, and forcing everything to conform to it. 

In opposition to Frazetta's very Apollonian forms, Jeffrey Jones's far more Dionysian forms also animate very abstract backgrounds but in a different way - less aggressive and domineering, more graceful and flowing and elegant. It's not a powerful warrior imposing his will on his surroundings, it's grace flowing outward from a quiet interior of a sexually conflicted man who's femininity comes from within rather than being external. And in emerging and issuing forth, that grace brings harmony to the surroundings. Sometimes it seems to be somewhat negative - I assume this is natural for a sexually conflicted male who draws comfort at times from his inner femininity but is also plagued by it in terms of embarrassment and ridicule from others and who battled against the fact that he's not going to be accepted on anything like normal terms by anyone, but he needs to express himself this way and suffers more if he fails to. 

Williams isn't near either of these polar extremes, but somewhere in between. He is a powerful sexual persona himself. They're all very attractive people who surround themselves with other attractive people and act as their own models as well as drawing their friends and associates - at least this is true for Williams, and to some extent Frazetta. I know Jones often drew himself from polaroids. In many ways the paintings are self portraits - in addition to frequently looking like the artist they also reflect his values and worldview - his life as it were. 

Article:

There's a particular lineage of fantasy painters that I'm mainly interested in - it starts with Godfather Frank Frazetta and moves through Jeff Jones to Kent Williams. 

Each is the artistic offspring directly of his predecessor - started out practically copying and then found his own voice and grew into a powerful artist with his own style. 

Frazetta seems to have singlehandedly forged the 60's/70's fantasy painting scene (drawing heavily of course from J Allen St. John, but powerfully altering his approach and creating the trademark hypermasculine warrior look). Thinking about St. John I seem to recall he was already doing what I call the swirling mist technique - I'd need to check on that to male sure but at least he was already doing much of what Frazetta would capitalize on and make his own later. But his figures were emaciated and slender - which was apparently a thing in 20's and 30's fantasy/pulp artwork (when men were often depicted as very feminine, with cupid's bow lips and delicate features). Lol, it's almost as if St Johns's heroes were sxrawny guys getting sand kicked in their faces at the beach, but suddenly, from the back pages of the 60's comic books steps Charles Atlas making Frazetta's heroes big and buff - meaning of course that it's largely thanks to the influence from superhero comics and probably the new type of pro wrestling that Frazetta was responding - a new type of pop culture depiction of the heroic male that would find it's ultimate expression in the steroid-fuelled bodybuuilders and action heroes of the 80's). 

So the tropes that Frazetta used to define the new fantasy painting genre had been around - hell probably  since the Renaissance! Colorful swirling mist used to simplify a background and figures to their absolute essentials, shadow mapping to divide the composition into distinct areas of light and shadow - these had been staples in painting for centuries actually, but Frazetta found a new more powerful and singularly simple way to apply them that allowed him to work extremely rapidly and actually create a painting in one marathon session of maybe 8 to 12 hours over a caffiene-drenched weekend or even a single night. 

It's specifically these techniques that Frazetta's followers picked up on, some more perceptively than others (some used them rather heavy handedly with little finesse and created a ghettoized caricature of the genre even while it was still in its early phase). To name names, Ken Kelley was one of the lesser artists who essentially copied Frank's approach but hadn't developed a great deal of facility at art - especially when it comes tp the human figure. His robots were always better than his humans, which were always awkward and wooden and funnily enough had shiny highlights on their skin as if it was hard plastic or metal! That always freaked me out a bit - I wondered if maybe they were supposed to be sweating really bad, but then the clothing and hair would be dark with dampness, and it wasn't. 

But Jeffrey Jones was the best of Frank's followers, absorbing his techniques and after a brief period of being an imitator developing his own variations. I believe it was while he was at the very beginning of his painting education that Jones discovered and latched onto Frazetta (not at all sure of that - it's just a hunch) and I assume that's why those techniques seem to comprise the majority of his painting knowledge (though he did supplement it later with lessons garnered from Howard Pyle and Gustav Klimt as well as a few Impressionist and post Impressionist tricks). Somehow Jones wore his influences on his sleeve, always making it quite obvious who he was emulating at a given time, which often made people consider him a very derivative artist (fairly I would say, though I love his work). 

Which brings us to Kent Williams. As I understand it, he lived very near Jeff Jones and as a child would visit his studio and watch him paint, talk about art with him and the fantasy painting scene to which he belonged - I can imagine the stories about hanging out with Kaluta and Windsor-Smith and the occasional run-ins with Frank himself. Jones' influence is quite clear in Williams' early work, in particular in his landscape paintings and his Wolverine. Williams' Wolverine seemed practically a clone of Jones' Tarzan, with those somewhat distorted arms and thick Popeye wrists. And like both of his predecessors, Williams earned his early training in the comics medium, in his case in the early 80's with Marvel's Epic line of graphic novels and high quality comics, and moving to DC for at least one venture, an eerie moody graphic novel called Tell Me Dark, written by Karl Edward Wagner who had created the Kane character famously rendered by Frazetta a few decades earlier. 

A note about fine art:

All 3 of these artists have done fine art with varying degrees of success. In Frazetta's case I don't consider his attempts to be very successful, though maybe I'm being overly harsh. To me his attempts at fine art look too much like his fantasy work but just with less muscular figures - I don't feel he was able to throw off the onus of comic book muscularity enough to depict really evocative figures outside of fantasy work. Fine art in the figureative tradition is suposed to make profound and subtle observations about character and the human condition, but I feel Frank's work never really did that - like Clint Eastwood he made his definitive observations about the nature of testosterone-fueled masculinity and traditional conservative gender roles taken to an extreme. I want to say that Clint's filmic explorations of these same issues have been far more subtle and nuanced - that's not meant to be slam against Frazetta, just what I consider a fact. He wasn't trying to do subtle and nuanced, he was doing exploitative masculine fantasy and he did that extremely well. Frazett's paintings are meant for young adolescent boys to look at and say "Awww COOL!" - whereas Eastwood's films are aimed at an older more mature audience for the most part and meant to inspire some deeper thinking about traditional gender roles. At least in his later films directed by himself. 

Jones was far more successful than Frazetta IMO in fine art - his fantasy work was never really aimed at the same goal, it was itself a sort of rumination on the nature of those traditional hypermasculine gender roles - a sort of critique of Frazetta's more blatant exploitative side done by a young man who obviously was not fueled by testosterone and did not have a commanding masculine presence that made him a man among men and a lion among women like Frank obviously was. Jones in fact was plagued all his life with gender issues that resulted eventually in his decision to undergo a sex change operation (sorry, I'm not up on the current politically correct terminology - I suspect I got that wrong) and become Catherine Jeffrey Jones. So for him it really wasn't much of a leap to start doing fine art - basically he was doing that all along. Even his simple paperback covers and comic book work was never a cliched "fantasy" statement but rather an exploration from his own personal viewpoint of what the fantasy movement was about. 

It's harder to place Kent Williams. Frazetta and Jones seem to exist at the extreme polar ends of the masculinity scale, but I'm not sure what to make of Williams. He's a very attractive man, quite physically fit and could doubtless do the fantasy male thing if he wanted to with nobody raising a questioning eyebrow. But he's almost painfully shy, and apparently is very sensitive and thoughtful - two qualities that lock him out of the He Man Clubhouse eternally. He doesn't seem to suffer from any sexual or gender related issues - seems to have no problem attracting vibrant and sexy people as friends who are happy to pose for him, both male and female, and he has no trouble depicting female or male beauty and sexuality, and doesn't seem to make statements that might characterize him as anything but a normal heterosexual man. But there are elements of his art (the strongest ones actually - it seems to be the main thrust of his fine art ouvre thus far) of exploring ideas of sexuality and desire, and how they relate to family existence in the contemporary world. In other words you could say he's springboarded off of Jones' nuanced and critical examinations of the fantasy genre and extended them - expanded them into his own fine art universe. To me he's by far the strongest of the three in fine art. In fact, as much as I love his earlier comic/graphic novel stuff, I actually greatly prefer his fine art (some of it - much of it is a bit too grotesque and intense for my personal enjoyment). Whereas Jones drew inspiration and technique from Gustav Klimt, founder of the Vienna Secession (if I remember correctly) and sexual satyr who enjoyed a loving and openly sexual existence with many  beautiful women and was always eagerly accepted buy society, Williams favors Egon Schiele, Klimt's protege who was a tortured soul with a very troubled psyche who did pain-wracked self portraits and portraits of women which seemed to dwell on isolation and depression.