Goodbye, Frank.
Frank Frazetta is gone.
I was raised looking at his art, and so I have never known a time without him. I have always loved his work, and had hoped someday to meet him in person just to be able to say I had looked a legend in the face.
Few people feel neutral about him. Despite his subtle use of color and shadow, there was nothing subtle about his work's visual impact. Barbaric, beautiful, mysterious, frightening . . . it is unmistakeable, and it's not particularly friendly. In over forty years, his work never lost its vitality.
For pity's sake, the reason his work looks dated to the modern viewer is because his work defined the look of an era. Speculative fiction was entering a golden age at that time, and Frazetta's work became indelibly attached to the genre. If Robert E. Howard invented sword and sorcery as we know it, Frazetta was there to tell us what it looked like. Very few artists have wielded that much influence, fewer still have held their position for so long. His art has been hugely influential, not just on other artists but on authors, musicians, filmmakers, game designers. . . .
Frazetta was not detached from his work. No artist worth a damn is, I suppose, but with him it always seemed so much closer to the surface. His paintings were organic and emotional, semi-lucid at times but never, never without feeling. He worked with paint directly, didn't sketch much, didn't analyze or fuss about or hesitate. His work was not mannered. Hell, in many ways, it had no manners at all.
There is a conduit of creativity that runs from an artist to their work, and in some people this conduit is frail, easily interrupted. They can be great artists, yes, but the process is fraught with roadblocks. I can't speak for what went on in Frank's mind but from all accounts, he didn't have this problem.
As an artist who has terrible problems with my own creative impulses, I look on his confidence and his fluidity with awe and grinding envy, and not a little apprehension of the sort we always feel for those who have an open line to the liminal world. And he did seem to have a window into that place, the world which lies beyond our perceptions and from which so many of us artists believe that our talent derives, whether we admit it or not. He held nothing back.
I do not know if he was a particularly spiritual man, but his work is spiritual in the most basic way: it feels connected to something beyond ourselves, our time, our place. In Frazetta's case, it was not some higher realm of light and love and right action; it was a primitive, dangerous, bloody world. At his best, he seemed connected to something primal, sometimes unlovely and sometimes terribly beautiful.
If you aren't familiar with his art beyond the Burroughs and Howard covers, go familiarize yourself with it sometime. It's bold and overstated sometimes to the point of being comical, but it can't be dismissed as cheesy, commercial, facile. Go look for the darker stuff, his lesser-known work. You find your way into it for the naked jungle princesses and the monster cats and that one guy stabbing crocodile with a knife, and it seems all in fun, but then you run across something genuinely disturbing, genuinely unsettling. It has a sincerity about it that few of his imitators share.
Art that moves us often reflects parts of us back at ourselves. Not many artists leave room for howling savagery in their work, you know? Frazetta did not show these powerful, frightening things to us as a way to condemn them. He didn't make them ugly. His work is powerful, undeniably meant to be beautiful. And so, ultimately, it doesn't condemn us for having those things within us. That is a rare thing to find. I appreciate being given the legroom.
The man led a full, interesting life, left behind him a family and a vast body of work, and has now followed his beautiful wife, so I know that there is no reason to grieve, but I do. I did not expect that this would hurt so much, but I keep having to stop writing when I find I'm crying too much to see, and so it has taken me ten hours to finish writing this.
As long as he lived, there was a small door open somewhere into a half-formed dream world of barbarians and beautiful, big-assed naked women and saber-toothed tigers and giant snakes, and now that door is closed and locked and nothing else will ever come through it again, not ever.
His passing ends an era. We will not see his like again.
I was raised looking at his art, and so I have never known a time without him. I have always loved his work, and had hoped someday to meet him in person just to be able to say I had looked a legend in the face.
Few people feel neutral about him. Despite his subtle use of color and shadow, there was nothing subtle about his work's visual impact. Barbaric, beautiful, mysterious, frightening . . . it is unmistakeable, and it's not particularly friendly. In over forty years, his work never lost its vitality.
For pity's sake, the reason his work looks dated to the modern viewer is because his work defined the look of an era. Speculative fiction was entering a golden age at that time, and Frazetta's work became indelibly attached to the genre. If Robert E. Howard invented sword and sorcery as we know it, Frazetta was there to tell us what it looked like. Very few artists have wielded that much influence, fewer still have held their position for so long. His art has been hugely influential, not just on other artists but on authors, musicians, filmmakers, game designers. . . .
Frazetta was not detached from his work. No artist worth a damn is, I suppose, but with him it always seemed so much closer to the surface. His paintings were organic and emotional, semi-lucid at times but never, never without feeling. He worked with paint directly, didn't sketch much, didn't analyze or fuss about or hesitate. His work was not mannered. Hell, in many ways, it had no manners at all.
There is a conduit of creativity that runs from an artist to their work, and in some people this conduit is frail, easily interrupted. They can be great artists, yes, but the process is fraught with roadblocks. I can't speak for what went on in Frank's mind but from all accounts, he didn't have this problem.
As an artist who has terrible problems with my own creative impulses, I look on his confidence and his fluidity with awe and grinding envy, and not a little apprehension of the sort we always feel for those who have an open line to the liminal world. And he did seem to have a window into that place, the world which lies beyond our perceptions and from which so many of us artists believe that our talent derives, whether we admit it or not. He held nothing back.
I do not know if he was a particularly spiritual man, but his work is spiritual in the most basic way: it feels connected to something beyond ourselves, our time, our place. In Frazetta's case, it was not some higher realm of light and love and right action; it was a primitive, dangerous, bloody world. At his best, he seemed connected to something primal, sometimes unlovely and sometimes terribly beautiful.
If you aren't familiar with his art beyond the Burroughs and Howard covers, go familiarize yourself with it sometime. It's bold and overstated sometimes to the point of being comical, but it can't be dismissed as cheesy, commercial, facile. Go look for the darker stuff, his lesser-known work. You find your way into it for the naked jungle princesses and the monster cats and that one guy stabbing crocodile with a knife, and it seems all in fun, but then you run across something genuinely disturbing, genuinely unsettling. It has a sincerity about it that few of his imitators share.
Art that moves us often reflects parts of us back at ourselves. Not many artists leave room for howling savagery in their work, you know? Frazetta did not show these powerful, frightening things to us as a way to condemn them. He didn't make them ugly. His work is powerful, undeniably meant to be beautiful. And so, ultimately, it doesn't condemn us for having those things within us. That is a rare thing to find. I appreciate being given the legroom.
The man led a full, interesting life, left behind him a family and a vast body of work, and has now followed his beautiful wife, so I know that there is no reason to grieve, but I do. I did not expect that this would hurt so much, but I keep having to stop writing when I find I'm crying too much to see, and so it has taken me ten hours to finish writing this.
As long as he lived, there was a small door open somewhere into a half-formed dream world of barbarians and beautiful, big-assed naked women and saber-toothed tigers and giant snakes, and now that door is closed and locked and nothing else will ever come through it again, not ever.
His passing ends an era. We will not see his like again.