Goodbye Frank Frazetta
His paintings drew me into worlds of adventure and debauchery; worlds that my parents never would have approved of. 8th-grade boyhood, dungeons and dragons and the $1.50 fantasy paperback will never be the same. There will never be a fantasy artist like him. Frank Frazetta dead at 82.
posted by Viceroy De Los Osos at 3:02 PM
3 Comments:
I'm going to take this opportunity to declare: I like his art a lot.
Anyone who hasn't seen "Painting With Fire" should give themselves a treat and rent it immediately. Frazetta was a man among men, big, strong, unwilling to sell out he lived life on his own terms. When a stroke paralyzed his right hand, he taught himself to paint left-handed.
I looked at a bunch of these - a great illustrator, he paints his super-sexed women "correctly," in a very fluid, twisting form, which much more difficult that it might seem. A tribute to him is that there are a fanzillion fantasy artists, and few really understand anatomy, fewer still composition (it would be interesting to redraw these without subject matter), and almost none painting's sculptural surface. The man had the skillz.
Side note: the fine art v. illustration wars are sort of over, from frazetta to Crumb to even Norman Rockwell, the art world has learned to embrace excellent pop. And that means cash money.
Post a Comment
<< Home