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. 

Catching up... and I CAN FREAKING PAINT NOW!!!

This is amazing... I can't believe I can actually PAINT now!! Was starting to think it was never going to happen. But thanks to photoshop and my tablet I can get the colors and values in the right places now and make it all look good! And suddenly it's like I've busted through that wall I've been beating my head against for a few decades - the wall that's always stopped me from working in full color. Busted through and I find myself in an entirely new realm of amazing freedom and vast spaces and colors. Incredibly exciting!! And now the skills I had developed in pencil are rising up to their old levels and beyond - and I'm extremely happy to note that my concepts about the human figure, anatomy and picture-making in general have reached new levels of sophistication.

Working in color gives you far more subtlety than greyscale ever could.

Full canvas revealed at last! plus New simplified background

Made a drastic decision concerning the background - the X shape behind him was very distracting and unnecessary - all attention would be on him regardless. I was really unsure as I did this, but I like it - in fact it looks very Frazetta-esque. Now I can really see the left half as a back cover, and the little rock spur on the right is suggesting a story for the front cover.

Lol his head looks really stupid now - seems too small and I finally faced the fact that it needs to be completely redrawn. So does his entire abdomen/pelvis - I might need to temporarily extend the canvas downward far enough to sketch in his legs so I can figure out the pelvis form.

Really digging' the new simplicity! I'll probably airbrush in some lighter purple here and there just to break up the flat solidity of it.

"It's full of bows... "

The title is the line that first occurred to me when trying to think of a name for today's post. It comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey - the original line is "It's full of stars", but I wanted to denote the new discovery I've made about the way this painting is starting to look. Originally the composition was built almost entirely from triangles, but as I've been developing the anatomy and gradually fixing the structural problems (mostly associated with that damn upraised arm) I noticed the triangles have begun to take on a slightly different look - for example look at the line of the underside of both arms, and at the lower edge of his ribcage. As it all comes into focus and takes on its form the triangles are looking strangely - bowed.

At first I wasn't thinking bows - I was thinking brackets. You know, like on the keyboard - not the simple parentheses but the more compound double-bowed shape of the fancier brackets {these guys}. Then I realized with somewhat of a thrill what those brackets resemble.

Ironically {and I had to laugh out loud when I realized this} the line from 2001 was spoken by the character Dave Bowman...

Anyway, I'm still hammering out the issues with the structure of the drawing - getting the figure and all elements of the composition properly shaped. I'm willing to spend as long as it takes to do this - I really like the way it's firming up. Next I move on to getting the values right, and then colors. The separation of drawing, shading and coloring, as espoused by the Renaissance masters. You really do need to tackle them in that order - or at least I think you do (still pretty new to this though). It's working for me anyway.

Form Studies

Didn't like the perspective on that last one so I reworked it a bit:

This stuff is pretty hard to do for weird reasons - creating the masks takes forever and you run into all kinds of unforeseen problems, especially when trying to do perspective. I also don't really like the mechanical airbrushy look of them - I want to do freehand painted versions soon. Plus - I couldn't even tell you where the light source is in those last two! Sort of abstract. Hmmmmm - perspective is still off too..

Kept messing with it, playing around a lot with the Dissolve mode and a bit of blur to soften edges - this looks a lot better! Less mechanical, more organic. This is doubtless far better than a completely freehand sphere painting - no problem with starting from a mechanically perfect circle as long as you overpaint enough to disguise its origins and make it look all soft and fuzzy like this. 

Ok, Getting tired of re-working this one, but I corrected the overdark shading and the overbright highlight. Developing my photoshop muscles. 

Advice to myself - try starting with greyscale painting then add colors

All the endless tweaking and noodling I"m doing on this painting is due to the fact that I didn't start with a good drawing or underpainting - instead I started trying to modify an existing oil painting by chopping and rearranging and stretching parts of it, and then I started little by little very timidly, adding in tentative bits of color that were never strong enough (nor were the values).

Unless I start with a full value drawing I'm afraid I'll always be too timid with the lights and darks, and also with strong colors.

But by starting with a full-range tonal underpainting in greyscale I eliminate the problem of having to work up to darks and lights. At least in pencil I seem to be able to handle that well enough - hopefully it works in digipaint too.

Then I can use something like maybe the color replacement tool to start to change the greyscale to colors, and then just go in with direct painting. Which brings up my next bit af advice to myself:

Direct painting is the way to go most of the time. 
I'm glad I did so much messing around with adjustment layers and the various Transform techniques and the Liquify filter, but it tends to take way too long to do things that way and too many little recovery steps afterwards to fis up the unexpected mistakes that occur. I usually find when I;m messing with that stuff it goes on endlessly, and then when I finally decide screw this I'm going to paint directly on the background layer itself then I get rolling for real. I really am glad I did it all though - I've learned so much about using photoshop, so it's been an excellent learning stage.

I want to do simpler paintings and work out a speedpaint system.
This one has become so detailed and painstaking I can hardly believe it! I seem to be packing every square inch with full details to a minute scale - this is not the way Uncle Frank painted!! Working in pencil I know how to simplify, where to make a focal area and where to fade detail and just use basic composition. But by doing such a sheer volume of painting and repainting and repairing and re-doing and un-doing etc I'm really making this one into a huge learning experience - by the time it's done it'll be the equivalent of a year's worth of lesser paintings.

... That is all. Thank you.