Art Fantastique

At university, I had a wonderful opportunity to study History of Art, concentrating in areas of Early Renaissance, Egyptian and Gothic cathedrals. It's all very well to be able to tell Filippo Lippi from Filippino Lippi and a corbel arch from a corbel vault, yet I'm happy that my exposure to the great treasures of the art world hasn't affected my ability to enjoy the often-discounted marvels of fantasy art.

The name itself sounds rather frivolous: fantasy art. Many write off fantasy - be it paintings or books - as flighty, exaggerated, boring, repetitive, and imbued with little meaning. Indeed, fantastic art has been devalued by the commercialisation of fantasy, a somewhat limp pseudopod of the monstrous pink and glossy gifts of industry. Unicorns and dragons were once sacred, but now they are commonplace. The unicorns look too much like ponies (although I confess My Little Pony was one of my cherished toys when I was a child), and dragons now exist in the form of plastic containers for bath soap.

Kitsch is comfortable, but true fantastic art is not. The latter is often bizarre and may border on disturbing, leaning far from pretty, pastoral landscapes and ubiquitous symbols of fantasy. A good example is Patrick Woodroffe, who also writes very poetic books to accompany his detailed surrealistic art. He's got the pastoral landscapes, but also some very unusual motifs and symbols that include giant fish-like vessels in the sky, a yellow girl, frog spawn and a snake tree. His numerous exhibitions and publications of children's storybooks led to his being commissioned for character design in the film The Never-Ending Story. Some of his work may be viewed here.

Isabelle Plante's works were exhibited at the Opera Gallery, Singapore in 2000, and I was fortunate enough to view them at the time. The French artist states that the imaginary is very important in her paintings. There are plenty of symbols within the frame and each character is a psychological portrait of someone she'd chanced upon in life. She always depicts a perspective extending towards infinity, refusing to shut things in because of the permanent swing between two worlds, shadow and light, and the desire to always penetrate the impenetrable. See her works here.

If the strange and incomprehensible is too much to handle, I'd suggest Kinuko Y Craft's work, not that her style is any less because of the lack of the bizarre. Her paintings have adorned book jackets of both contemporary fiction and fantasy writers. A graduate of The Kanazawa Municipal College of Fine and Industrial Art in Japan, also known as the "Kanazawa Bidai," Kinuko Craft has contributed paintings to the permanent collection of the National Geographic Society, Time, Incorporated, and The Museum of American Illustration in New York City. I collect the children's storybooks that she illustrates (a few are written by her daughter) because the books are goldmines: every page contains her exquisite renderings of color, detail and light. My favorite pieces are her four pictures made into posters for The Dallas Opera's performance of Wagner's Ring of the Niebelung. You can view these and more of her work at her site here.

It's hard to pin fantasy art down with a simple definition. The breadth of work created by various artists is not too far short of astounding. More evidence of the appreciation of such imaginative creations can be seen in the websites of famed Tolkien artists:
Tad Nasmith - known for great landscapes and evocative images that bring to mind key scenes in Tolkien's works.
John Howe - together with Alan Lee, he worked on the set design for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.
Alan Lee - he was invited by Peter Jackson to act as conceptual designer for the movie production. Peter Jackson couldn't have done better than selecting Alan Lee and John Howe to work on the trilogy. Another good site for Mr Lee's work can be found here.

I've never walked past a fantasy image without thinking "AH! What are they doing?" or "That's fantastic! Where do I pay? How much is it again?" It's hard to say if fantasy art will ever make it to higher levels of esteemed art, but it is, nevertheless, the production of imaginative and creative minds, and the act of creating something will always remain Art. With that debatable capital 'A'.

Posted by Monoceros at March 26, 2003 12:41 AM