Ragged Claws Network

Whenever I see SF paperback covers by Paul Lehr like the nine I posted yesterday, and the many others he created in a similar vein, I immediately think of Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” paintings and, to a lesser extent, ”The Sacred Wood”:

I was tempted to file the comparison between Böcklin and Lehr under “Call and Response,” but I guess I am just not quite convinced myself that there’s any direct influence from one to the other — although the impossibly jagged cliffs in Lehr’s cover for Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead (strange coincidence!) are tantalizingly similar, visually, to the trees in Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” variations. Or maybe I’m just seeing things!

From the bookshelves of yours truly, here are nine paperback covers (ten, actually) by Paul Lehr, along with one Lehr-ish cover by another hand:

BONUS IMAGE: [added 06 October 2009]

The sequence, Jongor of Lost Land (1940; repr. 1970), The Return of Jongor (1944; repr. 1970), and Jongor Fights Back (1951; repr. 1970), reminds me of the first Star Wars trilogy: Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983). Purely coincidence, I’m sure. LOL!

Here is the second in what is turning out to be a series of posts here at RCN featuring obscure SF book covers by Frank Frazetta. The first “obscure SF book cover” is over here.

Although Frazetta has plenty of classic covers to his credit, the cover for Time War is not one of them; this, despite the fact that Frazetta was, I think most fans of fantasy illustration would agree, at the height of his powers as a draftsman and cover artist around the time he painted it. Simply put, Time War is the epitome of an inadequately developed, compositional cliché wedded to flashy but underdeveloped, even desultory, technique.

Go in with me, and I will tell you my drift.

The controlling compositional idea here, bog-standard in illustration art, is to use something or someone in the foreground, often in shadow or silhouette, to frame and direct attention to something or someone of interest in the more brightly illuminated middle distance. In Frazetta’s uninspired variation on this idea, the main figures, which dominate the foreground, are turned away from the viewer and are looking off into the distance at a glowing planet from which several figures are emerging. Never mind the problem of where the foreground figures are standing, exactly, to give them such a view, the real difficulty here — the two-pronged problem that prompts me to label the painting “uninspired” — is that what they (and we) are given to look at and react to in the distance is neither in their direct line of sight — the foreground figures, the man and the woman, appear quite clearly to be looking at a spot below and to the right of the distant, stiff, faceless background figures — nor is the presumed threat, i.e., those distant, stiff, faceless background figures, anywhere near as visually compelling, beyond the lurid colours of the planet from which the threat is emerging, as the hero’s shirtless torso and heavily muscled arm and the woman’s shapely rear.

Aye, there’s the rub: as many of his fans have become aware over the years, when left to his own devices, Frazetta will seize any excuse, no matter how flimsy, to feature bare buttocks in a painting! Not that there’s anything wrong with bare buttocks (or gestural, flowing hair, or gnarled roots, or moss-covered deadfall, or any of the other elements that have become clichés of the Frazetta style), but the plain truth is that 1) nudity is neither necessary nor sufficient to create a first-rate paperback cover (and especially not an SF cover!), 2) nudity can very easily be fallen back upon as a titillating, eye-hooking substitute for real engagement and effort on the part of the artist, and 3) the nude figures here have been left mostly underpainted, with little of the impasto overpainting in the areas where the light is strongest that ordinarily gives Frazetta’s painted figures their variety, their three-dimensional solidity, and their overall liveliness. Yes, the figures are sort of in shadow, which accounts for the lack of detail, but in my view, they take up far too much of the composition to be left so under-developed.

That Frazetta himself recognized the inadequacy of his own work here is perhaps reflected in the following trio of facts: 1) Frazetta revised the painting after he got it back from the publisher; 2) the revised version has only been reproduced in one of the books on his art produced with his participation and blessing (see Arnie Fenner and Cathy Fenner, eds., Legacy: Selected Drawings & Paintings by Frank Frazetta [Underwood Books, 1999], p. 167); and 3) the original version has been reproduced, well, never. And although in the revised version both figures are completely nude, and their naked flesh has been brought to a level of finish it previously lacked, and the man is now brandishing a non-existant gun (seriously!), and the man’s right foot has morphed into a curious form that is neither foot nor boot, and the man’s genitalia, which common sense says should be clearly visible from this angle, is some strange configuration that is neither penis nor codpiece, and the woman’s hair is even more insistently Frazetta-like, and her backside is even larger and more moon-like, I say, even though Frazetta has made all these changes, the composition remains egregiously under-motivated, uninspired, and unconvincing.

Here’s a somewhat juicier image of a landscape painting by Jeffrey Jones that I posted a few days ago:

Notice the new information about the title, date, and size. That’s always great to have.

Here, as promised in a previous post, are all of the Idyl strips that I saved from Jeffrey Jones’s long-abandoned Web site:

I thought I only had four strips on hand; turns out, I have five. Enjoy!

Every once in a while, in my weekly rummage through the local thrift stores, I come across a few old paperbacks that call out to be purchased not for the stories, which may or may not be any good, but for the covers. That’s the case here:

Sax Rohmer, of course, is the creator of Fu Manchu, but who is J. Lombardero? He’s an illustrator, obviously, but beyond that, I have no idea.

On the same trip, I bought three original paperbacks in the “Operator 5” series (which I’d never heard of before I bought the books). Perhaps I’ll scan the covers of those for a later post. There’s one, in particular, that’s absolutely wild.

Here’s a painting that sold at auction for US$7,170.00 in February of last year:

Don’t click the image if you’re frightened by full-frontal male nudity.

The joke is *meh* but the artistry is first rate.

Whether they know it or not, plenty of people, especially fans of imaginative fiction of the 1970s, have seen book-cover paintings by Jeffrey Jones. Only a select few, however, even among Jones’s most ardent admirers, have had an opportunity to view examples from the artist’s growing body of work in plein air landscape painting in oil. The main reason for this gap in our knowledge of Jones’s work is that the landscape paintings have not been featured in any significant way in any of the books that have been published about Jeffrey Jones’s art. And, of course, the main reason for the inattention to Jones’s landscape paintings, in print, is the nature of commercial publishing, i.e., when readers know an artist as an illustrator, most publishers who step forward to publish books on that artist tend to want their books to focus on what the artist is already known for, rather than on whatever unpublished, personal work the artist would like people to see — and even more so when the unpublished, personal work in question consists of pure landscape paintings! (No offence intended, landscape painters!) Fortunately for you, however, this blog is not governed by any commercial considerations whatsoever. Thus, here is a selection of small image files of landscape paintings by Jeffrey Jones that were posted on the artist’s old Web site:

Sorry the images are all (with the exception of the last one!) so small, but beggars can’t be choosers!

Having checked my book collection this afternoon, 10 March 2009, I can now confirm that there are no paintings of landscapes sans figures by Jeffrey Jones in The Studio (Holland: Dragon’s Dream, 1979), or in Yesterday’s Lily (Holland: Dragon’s Dream, 1980), or in Age of Innocence: The Romantic Art of Jeffrey Jones (Grass Valley, CA: Underwood Books, 1994), or in Jeffrey Jones Sketchbook (Lebanon, NJ: Vanguard Publishing, 2000), although George Pratt’s interview with Jones in the Sketchbook does touch on landscape painting a couple of times (scroll down for a few choice quotations). Finally, in the largest collection of Jones’s work published to date, The Art of Jeffrey Jones (Nevada City, CA: Underwood Books, 2002), you will find only two small reproductions of Jones’s landscape paintings, one of which is incorporated into a text page as an illustration, which I think tells you all you need to know about the publisher’s interest in that particular body of work.

But what about Jones’s interest in landscape painting? Does landscape painting really matter to the artist, or am I just making stuff up?

Here’s George Pratt on painting landscapes en plein air with Jeffrey Jones:

I have known Jeff Jones for 20 years and have been a fan of his work for about as long as I can remember. I count myself lucky to be able to call him a friend.

I was in my first year of art school when I met Jeff at a New York comic convention, and after showing him some of my work he graciously invited me and Kent Williams to join him for landscape painting in upstate New York. For us this was tantamount to painting with Rembrandt and we lost no time in hustling up there.

What a time we had. At the crack of dawn Kent, J Muth, Bernie Wrightson, Dan Green, Allen Spiegel, Jeff and I would pile into various cars bristling with easels and drive to a location Jeff had picked out a week or so before. Mist shrouded the roads that wound up the Catskill mountains and we’d tell ghost stories as we drove along, scaring each other pretty well. Scarier still was watching Jeff work.

He opened my eyes to the true joy of painting. He never taught, but over the years dropped nuggets of information, crystallizing everything I had been struggling for; miniature bombshells that had me convulsing in artistic fits for weeks afterwards. He took the time to look at the work and respond to it in a positive way, which meant the world to me, and I grew. What I walked away with was the idea that art is a spiritual journey of the heart. [Jeffrey Jones Sketchbook, p.3]

And here’s Jones:

This is one of the reasons I love to paint landscapes. It takes problem-solving out of the work. In the studio there’s a lot of problem-solving that goes on because so much of it has to come out of my head. I have to make it work, because it doesn’t exist and you can’t go out and look at it. When I’m out there landscape painting all I need is right in front of me, and there’s nothing that needs to be in my head. It’s like a vacation from my studio. It’s rejuvenating in the same way a vacation is. [Jeffrey Jones Sketchbook, p. 54]

I had to get used to it, because it wasn’t familiar, the wind and the bugs. I’d put a paint rag on the end and it would blow off, all those kinds of things. I finally realized they were only excuses not to be landscape painting; they weren’t really reasons at all. I didn’t want to come here in the first place, so look at all the excuses I can make up not to be here. What would happen if I came out because I wanted to? Funny thing… I didn’t find any excuses! [Jeffrey Jones Sketchbook, p. 56]

Nobody has to see it and you know it. If you like it, you like it; if you don’t, you don’t. That’s the end of it. There’s no deadline, no patron, no nothing. I wish everything could be as fun as a landscape, but everything is not. The more fun I’m having, the more I want to paint and draw. [Jeffrey Jones: Sketchbook, p. 57]

From Epic Illustrated #11, pages 26 to 33: