| Article: 458
From: leeper@mtgzfs3.mt.att.com (m.r.leeper )
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.books,alt.books.reviews,rec.arts.fine
Subject: Review of ART OF MICHAEL WHALEN
Date: 13 Dec 93 00:36:33 GMT
A Visit to THE ART OF MICHAEL WHELAN: SCENES/VISIONS
Bantam Spectra, ISBN 0-553-07447-4, 1993, $60.00.
A book "visit" by Mark R. Leeper
Rather than simply to review this impressive book, I have decided to
log my experiences as I encounter the book, much as I just finished a log of
my experiences as I encountered India. The book is, after all, almost a
museum in compact form. The difference between such a log and a review is
that I reserve the right to digress and tell what other thoughts come to
mind as I experience Whelan's book. Bear with me or skim. The same advice
goes if you don't have a copy of the book to consult.
To begin I should preface my remarks with my own attitudes. In truth,
I am sort of neutral toward Michael Whelan's art. I like most of what I
have seen of it but cannot say that I have ever been totally bowled over by
it. That is little reflection on him. Art is just not one of my major
science fiction interests. At world conventions I generally visit the art
show, but walk through it quickly and later can remember little of what I
have seen. However since this book has become available to review, I intend
to review it and get my impressions on paper.
I do go into this exercise with very one minor bone to pick with
Whelan, in general. That is I really do not like what he has done with H.
Beam Piper's Little Fuzzies. I first read LITTLE FUZZY in an old Avon
paperback with a Fuzzy on the cover. That cover artist portrayed Fuzzies as
intelligent looking primates with a sort of downy fur. That is just about
right. Whelan's Fuzzies are little teddy bears with huge glassy cat's eyes.
He was clearly more interested in making them cloyingly adorable than
intelligent. Whelan, the one time I met him, admitted that he himself was
not really fond of his own conception of the Fuzzies. It is among the worst
of his art, but it seems to have hit some sort of a responsive cord and it
has brought him some success all by itself.
In any case, Whelan has put together a major selection of his art in a
coffee table book. As of this instant I have barely looked inside of the
book, and I will give you my impressions as I do.
Whelan starts with a short enjoyable preface mostly saying he skips
prefaces in art books and you can also. Instead he has put in the text of
three interviews and lets Anne McCaffrey, Terry Booth, and David Cherry
bring out the questions the reader might want to ask.
Next there is a short introduction by Jackson Koffman giving some
biographical information and a commentary on some of the paintings. A note
here: there is a problem in the proof-reading. Two or three of the page
references point to the wrong pages. However the paintings are worth
digging out as they are well worth studying. One in particular, for his
Avatar series, resulted from Koffman's suggestion that Whelan try
consciousness deprivation. It show pillars seven stories or so high holding
the ruins of the room. The same painting is also on the dust jacket,
incidentally.
Anne McCaffrey's interview delves into the early days of Whelan's
interest in art, including an amusing story about what Whelan did to his
parents' coffee table. (Now why didn't I ever think of doing that? I still
might.) He also goes into contributions his wife has made and
contributions--or lack thereof--of teachers. McCaffrey also gets him to say
a little about how he distills an image from a novel.
The collections of his paintings are divided in two sections--he uses
the term "galleries" which fits nicely into my concept for this review. I
often talk about art books which take "full disadvantage of the medium."
Typically that means that illustrations are spread over two pages so that
the crease ruins just about every picture. Whelan usually does not take
disadvantage of the medium. ("Wing" is spread over two pages and while not
as bad as it might be, would have been better if printed smaller to avoid
the crease.) His paintings generally appear only on the right page in
beautiful reproduction with very rich colors. The left page has title, a
two- or three-paragraph commentary, and one or two small monochrome
reproductions of alternate concepts for the same cover or sketches he used
to prepare the painting. The title, incidentally, may be the same or
entirely different from the title of the painting or the work he is
illustrating. I will use the title Whelan has used in the book on the page
facing the painting.
The illustration for "Delirium's Mistress" shows a flying lion that
seems a bit unstable. The lion would have too much weight behind the wings
to keep its hind-end from falling down. Whelan's flying dragons seem a bit
more aerodynamically correct. Ray Harryhausen, in a similar task, actually
made a Pegasus look not too bad in flight in his film THE CLASH OF THE
TITANS. Even the lion in the alternative concept on the facing page looks a
little more air-worthy, but this fellow in the painting looks like he does
not have enough lift in back. So his legs will fall, his wings will hit the
air at the wrong angle, and he will stall. Sure, you could say the lion is
magic and does not obey physics, but then why should it have wings at all?
Oh, this lion clearly is strange in one more regard: it has the mane of a
male lion, yet from this angle it seems to be missing an important piece of
plumbing that for most lions is part of what makes having the big mane
worthwhile. Poor fellow will be able to attract flying lionesses with that
mane but then will find himself with nothing to do but flap his wings at
her.
Whelan's six pages of Fuzzy art are ghastly, but at least he gets them
out of the way early on.
His piece "The Amazing Dragon" did not do as much for me as the
possibly unrelated pencil sketch of a dragon on the facing page. The
muscular neck makes the pencil sketch more physical somehow.
It clearly wasn't the dragons that were on Whelan's mind when he did
"Dragonsdawn." The painting itself, and especially the drawing that led up
to it, show more effort on the female figure. Not that it is a bad sight to
look upon, but one wonders why young women are always so attractive in
Whelan's world. Hollywood takes a lot of heat for using this myth equating
virtue and beauty, but popular graphic art like Whelan's does it no less.
The final dragon painting is "Dragon Fire" which reminds me a lot of
what I consider one of the greatest (and most under-rated) fantasy films
ever made, DRAGONSLAYER. The setting, the colors, and perhaps even the head
of the dragon remind me of the visuals from the film that came out early in
the 1980s well before this painting was done. Looking at the painting,
however, there is something very wrong with how the limbs come out of the
body. What I see is anatomically unconvincing, sort of like illustrations I
have seen of Edgar Rice Burroughs' four-armed Martians. I do like the
snake-like coloring of the dragonhide.
The covers for THE SNOW QUEEN and THE SUMMER QUEEN are the sort of
illustration that gives inspiration and fits to costumers at science fiction
conventions.
For "Paradise" we have one of the rare examples where Whelan picked
wrong, in my humble opinion. The alien in the painting is almost without
personality. The one in his alternative concept, only a slight variation,
clearly seems to have a sort of wisdom and more interest value for me.
"The Doll" brings to mind the hilarious story of Kate Pott, a friend of
mine, whose brother hanged her doll when she was young. If you run into her
at a Worldcon or a Massachusetts convention, ask her about it. Again the
alternate concept works better for me. But, of course I am just back from
the land of the Thugee.
Both illustrations of "Nightmare in Red" are good, but while the main
one is creative, the alternate is really disturbing, which makes it a better
choice. I think the same is true for the "Boogeyman" choices. I don't
think there is any connection to "Tile Work" on the facing page, really.
Clearly it is the former he prefers, but it is the latter that really is
disturbing.
Whelan's concept for "The New Springtime" is not too different from
what he should have done for Fuzzies, except it would not have paid as well.
Certainly the eyes are a lot better than the goggly Fuzzy eyes.
"Aliens" is fun. It reminds me of some famous painting I have seen but
I can't quite remember.
I cannot say I like Whelan's lion-man as Chanur. That may well be what
Cherryh described in the novels, I haven't read, but when I see this sort of
thing I think of a silly film called OCTOMAN in which the monster was a
ridiculous combination of man and octopus. That creature was designed by
George Barr as a joke after several better concepts of what an octopus-man
would look like. When I talked to Barr he still cringed at the choice the
filmmaker made. In any case, any evolutionary scenario that would create
such a thing as this lion-man would be laughably absurd. Given that Whelan
had to create such a beastie, he probably did a reasonable job, but it is a
bit too sugary-cute a concept for me. Of course I know there are a lot of
cat fanciers out there who read Cherryh, but as much as I am a dog fancier,
I would NOT like to see Whelan's concept for a race of Dachshund-men.
I am not sentimental about Heinlein sufficiently to appreciate "Last
Look Back." The painting, particularly its colors, shows a strong Maxfield
Parrish look.
How can they be "Amazons" if they all have both their breasts?
Whelan talks a little about what is necessary in doing a wrap-around
cover for THE STONE OF FAREWELL. It must be different from most paintings
in that there must be two areas of focus at different parts of the painting.
The bee-like ship for "Santiago" is a creative image and among the
better works of the book.
None of the above reservations about Fuzzies apply to Hokas. Hokas are
supposed to be cutsey. While these may not be the most challenging images
Whelan has painted, he has done a good job here.
"Red As Blood" nicely escapes being Disney-esque in style while still
being a very Disney-like subject. The black-and-white on the facing page is
a beautiful rendering of a horror scene. I take it from the caption that
"The Birth of Lilith" was not used. Still it is better than a lot of his
more familiar works. Of course the black and white helps the mood. Colors
would have to be carefully chosen not to ruin the feel.
"Descent" is again in a color scheme reminiscent of Parrish, perhaps
not as much, but it is still there.
For "Daetrin," the final painting is much better than the sketch of the
alien. Whelan raises the question of whether the books with the alien or
the human on the cover would sell better since some copies were printed with
each, but he never answers the question. I suspect the copy with the human
sold better, but not to me.
For "Golden Witchbreed" Whelan says he needed was a symbol to tie the
composition together. Elsewhere he talks about symbolism in his paintings.
I wonder if the symbolism is picked up by the book buyer on a conscious or
even subconscious level. Or is it too subtle to make the impression he is
hoping for. The figures look extremely unnatural and posed in this
painting. I cannot imagine how they would ever get into this weird
position, but then I haven't read the book.
Next we come to the "gallery" called "Visions." This section is where
Whelan is a true artist doing his own thing. The section has non-
commissioned art, art that Whelan has painted to please himself. It starts
with a quote by Jung: "The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and
most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into the primeval cosmic
night .... In dreams we pass into the deeper and more universal truth."
Now this is purely an aside, but I wonder how many of us have questioned
whether that is really true. Has anyone ever proven that the content of
dreams has more than superficial significance? Are they significant any
more than the position of the stars at the time of birth or the lines in the
palm of the hand? You can build something that seems like a science out of
reading deep meaning into any of these things, but how do you know that
dreams really do have deep meanings? Sure, you can even appear to get some
positive results out of studying each, but that does not necessarily make
them valid.
Terry Booth owns the Brandywine Fantasy Gallery and interviews Whelan
to lead off the section on Whelan's own art.
Whelan describes the difference between this art and the commissioned
art as being the material we have seen already in scenes, what we are coming
to now is visions. I guess that leaves no room for simple images from his
imagination. Or perhaps he considers whatever he sees in his imagination as
a vision. Maybe it has to have the force of a vision to last long enough to
get it on canvas. Still calling them "visions" borders on pretension. And
he does seem to use the "Vision" art for commissions also, apparently.
Whelan says that his primary motivation in his art is to express his
personal visions. This work is closer to his heart than the illustrations
which he does to give him the financial security to do his own stuff. Also
the illustrations allow him an opportunity to develop the techniques to
apply to his visions. However, the fact that he is a commercial illustrator
is looked down upon in the "serious" art community. Of course the serious
art community cannot support many artists very well, so it is my guess that
the really serious artists use everything they can to establish a pecking
order. And many of the most successful do art that to me expresses a lot
less than even Whelan's Fuzzies. There is a lot of truth in serious art but
also a lot of sham also, at least in my opinion.
Whelan divides symbolism in his paintings into three categories:
narrative, conscious, and subconscious. Narrative symbolizes themes in the
book he is illustrating. Conscious symbolism is what he puts in
intentionally responding to his feelings about what he is expressing.
Unconscious is what he later reads into a painting after--perhaps long
after--it is completed. He gives an example of the last by saying that
there was a cover by another artist fascinated him as a child and which he
had forgotten about. Later he used a similar idea in a painting of his own.
Somehow I do not think that has much to do with symbolism, per se, but with
just the use of one concept.
Booth says to Whelan, "One of the reasons your art is so successful is
that you can reach people who are unsophisticated about the art world but
open to emotions and ideas." I had a chuckle at that. I am sure it was not
intended as a put-down, but grocery store tabloids also appeal to people who
are unsophisticated but open to emotions and ideas ... ideas like "Elvis is
living on Mars." I think he left out that the people are not just open but
also discerning.
Booth and Whelan choose different interpretations of "The Red Step"
(page 139). Whelan painted this during a fit of artist's block. The
painting shows a huge building and people moving toward the light. Whether
that is optimistic (as Whelan thinks) or pessimistic (Booth's view) is a
matter of interpretation.
Whelan sees art is a way to capture and preserve an experience. "Of
all creatures on this earth, only people are aware of their own mortality,
of the mortality and imminent decay of everything," he says. I am not sure
how much evidence he has for that statement. I would qualify it with an "It
seems likely that ...."
Booth asks if Whelan has special preferences for how his art should be
displayed. Besides things like the right height off the ground and proper
lighting, he said he wanted no food at a showing of his art. I guess it is
a bit of a distraction.
Whelan says that his paintings should reflect the world but more
importantly he wants his paintings to explore himself deeper and deeper with
time. He calls himself a sort of Indiana Jones in his own personal
universe. Okay.
Thus begins the actual entry to Gallery Two: Visions.
"Passage: The Avatar" I described already. Looking at this image of a
truly spectacular ruin I started to ask myself what Whelan had in mind that
the complete building would have looked like. My conclusion is that the
painting probably does not make any sense. The platform is probably wrong.
At least it look too small to have the much larger looking roof completely
cover it.
This painting also introduces the flame-in-a-bubble image that runs
(floats?) through the "Passage" series.
Ironically, in this section of the book where Whelan is showing the
paintings that most represent his own ideas, he has less to say about the
works than he has to say about the commissioned art. He probably feels the
images should speak for themselves.
"Climber" shows a huge ramped structure, but my question is, "Is there
a climber in 'Climber'?" I see nobody unless it is supposed to be the
little brown spot in the middle of the picture.
In "Armenia," a floating city has fallen in a desert setting while cute
Fuzzy animals play in the foreground. Technology fails and nature lives on.
Probably true, but it is more likely to be insects--especially beetles--who
survive technology. But they are not as cute to us as something mammalian-
looking.
The image of "The Causeway" does very little for me.
Whelan may know anatomy, but his physics seems lacking in "L'Echelle."
This flier would fall like a stone unless there is some sort of magic
keeping him aloft. "High and Dry" on the facing page warrants a second
look. The lizards have surprisingly humanoid torsos. I didn't catch that
the first time through.
In "Leavetaking" the position seems singularly uncomfortable. Why
would anyone not posed by an artist get into such a strange position?
"Destroying Angel" is effective, though I doubt most of the symbolism
comes across. This painting on the death of Jimi Hendrix strikes me as more
impressive than anything Hendrix did. But I admit I am not much of a
Hendrix fan.
The painting "Sentinels" shows small humans on huge hawk-headed statues
of gods. Whelan is creating his own fictional mythology. I think the
painting represents a nice concept and in some ways embodies what I look for
when I travel to non-Western cultures. In his commentary Whelan says he
thought the picture was painted too small. At exhibitions it gets lost
among his other works. Now he uses at minimum a four-foot-square canvas.
Perhaps this book has an equalizing effect. The size of the painting is
lost in the reproduction of this book. In any case, this is one of the
better works.
"Lights" is a Christmas card with idealized pictures of his two
children holding bowls with candles reminiscent of the flame bubbles of his
passage series.
"Passage: Verge" seems to over-dramatize Whelan's decision to do his
own work for a while without commissions. It represents Whelan's insecurity
over the decision to work on non-commissioned art for a few months rather
than do the more remunerative illustration work. It shows a woman standing
on a ledge over a huge precipice. Personally I think the woman was is a
more dangerous position than he was. If the woman goes over edge she will
not come back, but Whelan can probably always go back to taking commissions.
"The Subterraneans" is a piece showing a man dwarfed a huge unknowable
underground building. It evolved with time. Whelan got the idea of how to
show the huge structure while at his daughter's concert.
To make this huge edifice work Whelan said he had to break the laws of
perspective. However, it seems to me that nobody says he has to obey laws
of perspective. This is a digression, but it seem to me that contrary to
popular opinion your eye does not see following the laws of perspective.
(That is if I understand those laws and I cannot totally assure the reader
that I do.) The laws are just a better description of the way things look
than what came before them. The laws of perspective, as I understand them,
say you see straight lines as straight lines, but that is only approximately
true over short distances. Actually you see straight lines as subtle
curves. Suppose you had a field of vision of more than 180 degrees, like a
hawk does, and you were looking at two perfectly straight parallel lines,
say rails of an idealized railroad track. Suppose you were standing on one
rail so that the tracks went left and right from where you are standing.
The rails would at one time seem to meet off to your left and off to your
right at the two vanishing points. Your eye could not be seeing those rails
as perfectly straight lines since the two curves you see seem to be meeting
at two points. Your vision would actually subtly curving the straight
lines. But if it would curve the lines if you had 190-degree vision, it is
probably doing it with the field of vision of about 120 degrees that you do
have.
But I digress. Well I warned you I might. "The Subterraneans" shows
huge abandoned structures. The earlier "Sentinels" showed mammoth hawk-god
statues. These remind me of some of the immense structures we saw in the
Nile Valley. I can understand his interest in huge abandoned archeological
sites. They have much the same appeal as visiting real historical sites.
"Two Worlds" shows a Pan-like figure fluting on a bone while in the
background we see a field of graves in Ethiopia. The theme is that we in
the West are powerless to help and bring change to the Third World. I think
the meaning does not come across. That may be just as well since there are
a lot of people in the Third World who would find his attitude that we
should be going in and solving their problems patronizing and insulting.
"The Apotheosis of War" was supposedly inspired by the fighting in
Sarajevo. I have been in Sarajevo and there is nothing in the picture that
really is evocative of the city with its influence of the architecture of
three religions. Admittedly the foreground is symbolic, like the horsemen
of the Apocalypse, but the background fails to capture Sarajevo. This is an
emotional statement rather than an intellectual one.
"Wide" seems a bit redundant with "Open." Both seem to show entries
into a new world to show up in Whelan's paintings. Whelan wants to explore
this world more fully. Actually the world he wants to explore seems to be
the most angelically dull place imaginable. I hope he has some good ideas
because after two paintings I have absolutely no wish to see any more.
The closing interview is about materials and methods and the
interviewer is David Cherry. Cherry was the president of the Association of
Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists from 1988 to 1990, and being an artist
himself can ask Whelan about the technical aspects of his art.
Much of this discussion means very little to me and probably will not
mean much to other non-artists reading the book. It is a discussion of
materials used and of painting technique. For example it covers why Whelan
prefers acrylics over oils. Much I skimmed.
If you look however, there are still interesting bits to cull from the
interview. Whelan had some problems with the model for HECATE'S CAULDRON
that are amusing.
Whelan is a little apprehensive about the video revolution and what it
will mean to artists. An art director told him that in five years it will
be video technology that art directors will be using instead of artists.
Whelan doubts that the director will be able to find photos of dragons to
process. Personally, I doubt the technology will proceed all that fast.
People tend to underestimate both the size of the task of developing
something in technology and the power of persistence. That means people
overestimate technological advance on the short term and underestimate it on
the long term. Whelan may be wrong about how hard it would be to photograph
dragons, since artists like him have provided many photographable images of
dragons. They are copyrighted, of course, but not every idea packed into
one of those dragon images is. If you take the surface texture from "Filed
Teeth" (page 48) and apply it to the dragon in "Dragon Fire" (page 56), then
give it the body structure of "The Prize" (page 52), do you really still
have a Whelan Dragon? At what point does it drop out of copyright
protection? If an artist combined these elements on canvas, I doubt Whelan
would have much of a legal case. But doing it entirely with image
processing of Whelan's own images might not give Whelan any more of a legal
handle.
Cherry points out that people thought that photography would replace
art. Whelan said it only freed artists from drudgery art. Well as my
corollary to Santana, I say, "Those who remember the past are condemned to
be misled by it." Video-imaging is not just photography, and it inevitably
will be a big chunk of Whelan's market--whether Whelan takes that chunk
himself or leaves it to others is up to him. I suspect an artist as good as
he is will never have to worry about employment, but the are a lot of others
who will be pushed aside by new technologies. Whelan said of "Filed Teeth"
(page 48) that if he ever has to paint that many scales again he will commit
ritual suicide. Well, details like that are just what video imaging will do
well.
Whelan says there is no way to get an attractive permanent hardcopy for
video imagery. First for a lot of applications the hardcopy you can get now
is plenty good enough. Secondly the quality of what will be available in
the future will follow the demand. I may be making the Santana error, but I
suspect that hand-painted imaginative images, like Whelan makes now, will be
prized but considered a luxury just like hand-made furniture is prized
today. Of course, that seems to be ignoring how much a component of art
imagination is, but what sets Whelan apart from thousands of other fantasy
fans is not his imagination but his ability to render his ideas--
essentially, his technique. And technology is going to make technique a lot
easier to come by or at least replace it with something as effective. Lots
of people with the imagination but not the technique will be getting into
the act and letting the technology provide the technique. I didn't get much
from the discussion of materials, but I did get that an artist's materials
are hard to work with and take a lot of time--Whelan works sixty to seventy
hours a week--and very little of that is time spent thinking up the idea.
It is mostly spent on what the computer will do very quickly. Until now
materials have really gotten in the way of expressing imagination in a
visual way in a decent form. The computer will change that.
Whelan finishes his book with an appendix with details showing small
reproductions, years, materials, who commissioned the work, etc.
And with that the book comes to an end. My opinion of THE ART OF
MICHAEL WHELAN is that it is a bit pricey at $60, but well worth the effort
to go through to experience Whelan's thought processes and work. It also
makes a good coffee-table book.
%T The Art of Michael Whelan: Scenes/Visions
%A Michael Whelan
%C New York
%D October 1993
%I Bantam Spectra
%O hardback, US$60.00
%G ISBN 0-553-07447-4
%P 201pp
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzfs3!leeper
leeper@mtgzfs3.att.com
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper
--
Mark R. Leeper <leeper@mtgzfs3.att.com>, (908) 957-5619 Fax: (908) 957-5627
AT&T Bell Laboratories - MT 3D-441, 200 Laurel Ave, Middletown, NJ 07748
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