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- ABOVE: Howard Pyle, An Attack on a Galleon (c. 1905).
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- ABOVE: N.C. Wyeth, Westward Ho! (c. 1920).
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- ABOVE: Frank Frazetta, The Galleon (1973).
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- ABOVE: Frank Frazetta, Sea Serpent (1972), oil on canvas. Here’s a bonus: another painting by Frazetta inspired by An Attack on a Galleon by Howard Pyle.
Frazetta’s obvious borrowing from Pyle has been pointed out many times in the past; however, I’ve never seen anyone add Wyeth’s painting to the mix (although surely someone has, the line of influence being so clear). Now, of the three galleon paintings, it seems obvious to me that Pyle’s original effort is not only the first but also the best of the three. It’s the best composed; it’s the most expressively painted; it’s the most dramatic. No wonder Wyeth and Frazetta (who seems to me to have borrowed as much from Wyeth’s galleon as from Pyle’s) were enthralled by Pyle’s Attack on a Galleon. It’s a masterpiece. And which of the remaining two galleon paintings is the weakest, Wyeth’s picturesque, chocolate-box cliché or Frazetta’s virtuosic but underdeveloped pastiche? You decide…
RCN at Random:
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Frazetta is an amazing talent, but it seems his greatest artistic debt was to his friend, the late Roy Krenkel, who introduced Frank to the work of Pyle, Wyeth, Joseph Clement Coll, Norman Lindsey, J. Allen St. John and a host of other illustrators, without whom, Frazetta’s work would have been the lesser. Krenkel even provided the color (and compositional) roughs for Frazetta’s early CREEPY and EERIE magazine covers until he was off and running on his own.
Here’s a Frazetta painting and photo reference:
http://joevicas.com/frazforum/swipe02.jpg
Reference photo in preparation for the 1977 “The Gauntlet” movie poster (though this isn’t the actual photo Frazetta used for the finished piece):
http://tinyurl.com/34keq98
By all accounts, including his own, Frazetta loved cameras and took thousands of photographs during his lifetime. But he always denied that he used photo reference in his work. I wonder what he would say about the claim in that article that “Frank uses himself as the model to take photos in various positions to capture the correct position.” He couldn’t very well say the writer was mistaken; a sample reference photo is there, for everyone to see. Would he say that he only used reference photos of himself for the Gauntlet job? Maybe. However, the more I learn about Frazetta’s studio practice from people who observed him at work, the more I think Frazetta’s statements about how he produced his famous illustrations were invariably tinged with self-aggrandizement. Frazetta liked fans of his work to think that he just sat down at the easel, usually right before the deadline, and produced his paintings from scratch, out of his head, overnight. The public record, however — physical evidence as well as the testimony of friends and acquaintances — reveals a more mundane reality: Frazetta regularly produced preliminary drawings and colour comps for his paintings; he used an opaque projector to enlarge selected preliminary drawings, which he then transferred by tracing onto canvas; he used swipes for some elements; he drew from imagination; he drew from life; he drew from photo reference that he himself took; and so on. None of which ought to diminish anyone’s appreciation for Frazetta’s tremendous talent or accomplishment as a commercial artist. But Frazetta, in my humble opinion, is more admirable as a fallible human being than as a god.
I agree with your assessment 100%, RC! A marvellous, staggering talent, doubtless—but he used photo reference as much as the next fellow. Not a problem, just the bogus PR that “it all came from his imagination” is rubbish. That article, by the way, was from the self-published book Frazetta: the Living Legend (1980). It seems he (and those around him) changed his tune about his work methods afterwards to enlarge the “legend.” Totally unnecessary—he’s one of the all-time greats.