Why Frazetta? Or: A Picture Paints A Thousand Worlds...

Excuse the title, I couldn't resist.

I read an old post on a blog recently that talked about Frank Frazetta's art style. It was interesting - the author seemed to regard Frazetta as sort of a proto punk artist. That is, they noted his technique as lacking, even sloppy, with little regard for contrast and shading/highlighting, or other such arty things. That, they argued, was what gave the paintings their rawness and immediacy.

Now Frazetta paintings undeniably do have this quality of immediacy. And I'll get this out of the way right now: I'm not an artist or an art critic. I do paint miniatures, but that's about it. But what I am is a part-time phenomenologist. The phenomenologists are (were?) a specific breed of philosopher, whose main idea was to analyse how the structures of experience create meaning. And I think we can do a bit of amateur phenomenology on the experience of viewing Frank's paintings to explain why they're so compelling, especially to roleplayers and young readers who want to lose themselves in fantasy worlds. Because I have to respectfully disagree with that critic, who shall remain nameless (because I've lost the particular blog); I think that Frazetta's paintings are actually quite considered in their construction. I think the point of them is to create an arresting concreteness for the image, which is what makes the worlds he portrays so palpable.

If you take a look at the individual components of a Frazetta painting - for instance, his most famous painting of "Death Dealer" below - you may well think of his technique as sloppy. There's that sort of muddiness to the image, which seems to dissolve into undisguised brushstrokes away from the central focus. It's mostly brown, with little in the way of cool colours to balance out those ochres and oranges. But stop picking it apart for a moment. Lets get into the mindset not of someone deconstructing the image but of someone viewing the image as an audience to it. Imagine you've just picked up a cheap paperback with this on the cover.


Death Dealer and companion, Unnamed Horse

Now the reason for this exercise isn't to say "Don't analyse it, dummy! It's just cool!" That's not how we do things here. The reason is the cleverness in the technique of the image is in how it's set up to draw in the audience, i.e.: not someone doing a brushstroke-by-brushstroke analysis. When you approach it without deconstructing it, your eye is going to be drawn to different places, you'll pick up on different details, and your brain will do different things with those details.

Take, for example, contrast. I was surprised to read in anon's analysis that Frazetta's use of contrast was haphazard. In my view, the above image, arguably his most famous, is entirely built around careful, stark contrast, as is most of his work. One of the things I learned when I actually decided to start learning about miniature painting is that the eye is naturally drawn to the higher areas of contrast. This is why you generally want to apply brighter highlights higher up the miniature: It draws the eyes to the mini's face, which you usually want as the focus point. Helpfully, objects tend to be lit from above by the sun, so the overall effect of more highlights->generally lighter tone on the upper portions of the mini also looks realistic. It also helps that eyes are broadly pure black on pure white, since this puts the starkest contrast right where you want the viewer looking.

Frazetta uses exactly this technique in the above image; The area of highest contrast is unquestionably DD's helm, specifically the forehead - it's a dark shape on a white backdrop, so that's where your eyes go first. But there's no detail visible on DD's face, so why does Frank want you to look there? Well, one reason is that your eyes (or mine, anyway) are naturally drawn from the helm, to the face. This creates a feeling like you're burrowing into the image, not so much looking for artistic detail as trying to peer through the shadows - something you'd have to be in the actual world presented to do.

The other reason, and the more important one, I think, to understanding what's going on here is that the focus isn't really the face - it's the helmet, or specifically, the texture on the helmet. That's the other half of the Frazetta technique, namely the small areas of texture placed in those points of contrast the eye is drawn to. Often these are metalwork, usually helmets or shields, which give a solidity to the piece. Equally, if not more often, they are flesh. Yes, part of Frank's oeuvre is the showing of as much flesh as humanly possible. And this kind of carries over to the Death Dealer image - it's worth noting that the main three areas of white on black contrast that draw the eye are DD's helmet, his shield (or the top of it), and his horse's ass.

Why, oh why does Frank want so badly for you to look at this horse's ass? Well apart from his fixation with asses generally, the reason is that it, like the detailed metalwork textures, give a concreteness to the image. All of these small areas of texture are painted naturalistically yet vibrantly, so that you feel as though you could reach out and touch them. The painting plays, in these small areas, on the viewer's tactile experiences to create objects with a solidity and weight to them, a hardness or softness, while the composition channels the gaze towards these places. And this is a theme throughout Frazetta's work - you can almost always identify three or so areas of detail he wants you to focus on, and really get to grips with the textures therein. So yes, the answer is that Frank wants you, in your mind, to touch the horse's ass, in the same way as he wants you to feel Conan's muscles, or run your hand over Death Dealer's helm (provided you don't want to keep the arm it's attached to) - because having those small areas of naturalism makes the painting feel concrete, even when the rest is murky.

His eyes seem to say "I'm up here"

That, as far as I can tell, is what makes these paintings so compelling. The dynamism is there, certainly, and the images are evocative and expressive, but what makes them stick in the mind are these solid little details. And anyone who's experienced the desire to be drawn into and lost in a fantasy world, either as a player of RPGs or just as a reader, will appreciate how far making the world appear solid can get you with that. It's not necessarily about realism or believability per se. It's more like the quality that good "practical effects" have over bad CGI; they don't necessarily look like realistic creatures or what have you, but they do look like objects in space that you could reach out and touch. You can tell what Ludo from Labyrinth would feel like to the touch, even if only because you know what fake hair on a puppet feels like. If I was any sort of aestheticist (and if that was a word), I'd call this an "aesthetics of concreteness". I'm not, so I feel I can't, but you get the idea.

Why does it matter that these details occur in small islands? Why not plaster the whole piece with these textures, and allow the eye to wander freely? Well, that's certainly a viable approach - it's the one taken by Josh Kirby. And yet, I do think it loses something. I mentioned above about being drawn into the image, and peering through Death Dealer's shroud of shadows, but that's something that also persists throughout Frazetta's work. He wants you to fill in the gaps yourself, based off what he's shown you in his little islands of detail; you could hazard a guess at what's behind DD's shield, for instance, or at least what it would feel like. After all, that "filling in the gaps" of what we can't see is what we do in real life all the time. Frazetta doesn't do the classic fantasy artist thing of hinting at a new horizon for the viewer to explore themselves - Tolkien's "towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist" - at least not per se. (A funny quote from the internet about Frazetta's cover for At the Earth's Core: "Never did any illustrator give less of a crap about what was actually at the Earth's core.") What he does do is put you in the world by giving you firm, tactile touchstones from which  to subconsciously fill in the details lacking from the piece. It's more like equipping you to imagine, rather than inviting you to do so.

By contrast (pun alert) take a look a Kirby's work on the Tunnels and Trolls covers:


Never was so much fun got from such cheap paper.

These are some of my favourite book covers full stop. Tiny little brag: I have the entire run of Corgi editions of T&T from the eighties. In fact, they were what got me into roleplaying (albeit a few decades late). Josh Kirby did an amazing job, for all that, I now realise, he was basically ripping off Frank, to the point of actually doing alternate versions of his paintings (some of which may be recognisable above - looking at you, Mistywood).

Looking at those covers, the best ones have a sort of haze about them. Kirby is at his best when, as with the City of Terrors, he does what Frazetta does. In fact, it's more obvious when Kirby does it, because in his vivid, almost lurid style, nothing looks realistic (as in, realistically like a person, or a sword, or a shield), but for all that, the attention paid to the individual textures - the sheen on the muscles, the glittering filigree on the shields - sells a depth that it might otherwise lack. The pieces don't aspire to realism, but they do convey reality, as if through a lens of the fantastical.

But I find that my engagement with Kirby's paintings is almost like engaging with a Where's Wally (or Waldo, for the oppositely Atlantic) book, or a book of cutaway illustrations. I used to pore over those books as a child, because there were little hidden vignettes and features in the images. They were a vast, wide canvas of detail, but the detail they offered was somehow thin - it was fun to explore them as images, but it didn't feel like a window onto another world exactly. And that's sort of the impression I get from Kirby's work. The details are fantastic, and hit some of the same bases as Frazetta, and god knows I could stare at the for hours, where I couldn't Frazetta's work - they just seem to ooze pure fantasy. But for all the visual interest in the shields with faces, for instance, I don't feel like I could ask where each one was made, or by whom. The protagonists don't seem to me to exist beyond the one image - where we are drawn into speculating about Death Dealer's visage, I struggle to think what the faceless men in a few of Kirby's images would even look like.

It may be a matter of personal taste, and even then, I'm not saying I actually prefer Frazetta over Kirby, or the other way round - they're trying to do different things after all. But its worth noting again how deliberately placed the areas of detail are in Frazetta's paintings, and how that is consciously used to draw you in. Not everywhere merits the "high resolution" of fine brushwork; that stuff gets reserved for the bits that will really sell the reality, the concreteness of the image.

There's a lesson in here somewhere that can be applied to gaming. Something about showing little bits of world in high detail, and letting the players' own minds fill in the rest of the texture of the world. But I think the real lesson is probably, to return to a beloved silly word, a phenomenological one. When you appreciate a piece of media or art, even "low" art, when it makes a fantasy world feel palpable to you, and fires up your fantastical imagination, take a moment to reflect on why. Don't just focus on the qualities of the thing itself - no one put a painting together just to have gouache affixed to canvas. No-one bought a paperback thinking to themselves "Boy, those sure are lovely brushstrokes, better read this." Reflect on your engagement as an audience member. It's in reaching the audience that the artistic qualities of art live. And sure, think about games you run and play like that too: How am I engaging with this? How are my players engaging with this? Where is the feeling of reality coming from?

Art is magical in a way that gaming and reading are magical: It transports you to other worlds. That's it - that's all I've got for now.

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