The Poll you all Demanded! Boris! 0

[BCarter27]

Not to derail the Boris thread, who I love, but I always thought Ken Kelly was the more natural successor to Frazetta, style-wise. Curious what others think...

[Bronty]

57 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

That's a Julie Bell painting from 2003.  

They work on each other's stuff     

Heck I have one painting where the printed signature is 'BORIS' but the original is signed by Julie.  

That being said I probably should have noticed the credit and chosen a different example.

Edited March 14, 2018 by Bronty

[Bronty]

15 minutes ago, BCarter27 said:

Not to derail the Boris thread, who I love, but I always thought Ken Kelly was the more natural successor to Frazetta, style-wise. Curious what others think...

For me, too derivative.   Not that he didn't produce some nice paintings also.

Edited March 14, 2018 by Bronty

[vodou]

1 hour ago, BCarter27 said:

Not to derail the Boris thread, who I love, but I always thought Ken Kelly was the more natural successor to Frazetta, style-wise. Curious what others think...

 

56 minutes ago, Bronty said:

For me, too derivative.   Not that he didn't produce some nice paintings also.

Ken Kelly definitely take third place in a race of three (comparing prime period oils for each). However, some of those REH wraparounds he did for Berkeley Books and later reproduced in the 1978 REH calendar are something else. That's Ken's peak imo.

Edited March 14, 2018 by vodou
cleanup dupe images

[Bronty]

those are gorgeous - to me the size is evident there straight away.    You can tell those were painted at massive scale.  Or at least that would be my guess.

 

Edit:   hmm, not as big as I thought; google tells me 40 by 30 on one of them.   Still a large size but I was honestly expecting to read 60" or something

Edited March 14, 2018 by Bronty

[vodou]

Yes Bronty, all 30x40". Which by illustration standards of the mid-70s was MONSTER

Remember, the majority of Frazetta's masterpieces from the decade prior were 16x20" and (occasionally only) 18x24".

Awesome paintings but salon-style arrangement not great. Probably only impressive up on the wall one to a wall, in a tiny minimalist NYC apt

Edited March 14, 2018 by vodou
add image

[Bronty]

2 minutes ago, vodou said:

Yes Bronty, all 30x40". Which by illustration standards of the mid-70s was MONSTER

Remember, the majority of Frazetta's masterpieces from the decade prior were 16x20" and (occasionally only) 18x24".

Yup, I'm aware of the smaller size of the frazettas.    I actually find myself wondering if I would like them at that scale in person as much as I am 'supposed to' as I generally find 16 by 20 too small for a painting.  I can only presume his would be an exception     Need to see some in person.

Edited March 14, 2018 by Bronty

[Bronty]

For y'all collectors of tiny black and white drawings only, here's an old pic of a 30 by 40 with me standing beside it for scale.    I'm not the tallest guy at 5' 9" but the painting is so large that its hard to even get it in the shot.     Illustrations of that size do have great impact in person.

Edited March 14, 2018 by Bronty

[Bronty]

17 minutes ago, vodou said:

Yes Bronty, all 30x40". Which by illustration standards of the mid-70s was MONSTER

Remember, the majority of Frazetta's masterpieces from the decade prior were 16x20" and (occasionally only) 18x24".

Awesome paintings but salon-style arrangement not great. Probably only impressive up on the wall one to a wall, in a tiny minimalist NYC apt

Nice edit.   Cool seeing those, arrangement be damned.    That you in the pic?

[vodou]

5 minutes ago, Bronty said:

For y'all collectors of tiny black and white drawings only, here's an old pic of a 30 by 40 with me standing beside it for scale.    I'm not the tallest guy at 5' 9" but the painting is so large that its hard to even get it in the shot.     Illustrations of that size do have great impact in person.

But, but...but...it won't fit in an Itoya!

[Bronty]

Just now, vodou said:

But, but...but...it won't fit in an Itoya!

hahahah indeed   

[vodou]

1 minute ago, Bronty said:

Nice edit.   Cool seeing those, arrangement be damned.    That you in the pic?

No. Just some random dude that came up in Google image search. I'm considerably better looking

[Bronty]

14 minutes ago, vodou said:

No. Just some random dude that came up in Google image search. I'm considerably better looking

Older, too

[vodou]

2 minutes ago, Bronty said:

Older, too

I prefer...possessing refined taste

[Bronty]

Just now, vodou said:

I prefer...possessing refined taste

[delekkerste]

16 hours ago, vodou said:

Yes Bronty, all 30x40". Which by illustration standards of the mid-70s was MONSTER

Remember, the majority of Frazetta's masterpieces from the decade prior were 16x20" and (occasionally only) 18x24".

Awesome paintings but salon-style arrangement not great. Probably only impressive up on the wall one to a wall, in a tiny minimalist NYC apt

Any of those Frazettas would look out of place in a minimalist NYC apartment, IMO.  And, that is a real problem, I think.  As much as I fear what the Millennials and, especially, Gen Zers will want to buy/can afford in terms of comic art, you can multiply that 10-fold for Frazetta and 20-fold for Boris.  Pretty much anything that you frame like those Frazettas shown above I fear does not resonate well with those who like sleek, contemporary lines in their homes.  I also think a lot of younger peoples' only exposure to art like this is seeing it airbrush-painted onto the side of a van.       

Edited March 15, 2018 by delekkerste

[vodou]

23 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

Any of those Frazettas would look out of place in a minimalist NYC apartment, IMO.

Lack of generational context and imprinting aside, I can easily see several Frazetta and/or similar quality oils, correctly framed (contemporary, so not the way anybody has ever done it before!) per wall here. To add color and break up the swaths of "white".

[ESeffinga]

^I'm with Gene.

 

And to be honest taking a hard look at my own collecting habits, that reasoning is in many ways why I don't own some of that material either, and a variety of guys in capes for that matter. Batman being my one exception it seems.

And the Hale Badhair painting is about as close as I have come. And Phil would be the very first to tell you that the Johnny Badhair character was initially his attempt to channel some of the explosive energy of the single Frazetta image into a more modern character. And yet it has since spun away from that in the 30 years since. The kernel is still there, but it's drifted, much in the vein of Cerebus or something of that ilk, that's veered left of it's start. In Phil's case more into exploring human condition issues in an illustration mashed into a form of fine art kind of way. He talked about that struggle a bit at the first of the Spectrum Art Live shows about 6 or 7 years ago. The guys with the Sidebar Podcast used to have his talk up as an episode. Not sure if that's still floating around out there on the internet, for anybody that might care. And I get that even that will have its proponents and detractors, and frankly folks that just don't get it.

 

Anyhow it is very easy to overwork a piece and kill it's energy and verve. Often times when an artist is working on a piece, it's very hard to tell how far to push, and often they don't know what too far is until they've already pushed it there.

And at the risk of pushing the topic way too far off topic, it happens with pen and ink too. Pencil is lively because the gestural drawings are there intact. It's muscle memory at it's finest. Not thinking about drawing an arm, just doing it because you've drawn an arm 10,000 times before. The same with painting. If one is too precious about filling in an under-drawing, and then rendering the bejeesus out of it, they risk losing the feel and dynamics of that muscle memory of mark making. Worrying about getting a photo-real smooth oiled skin texture frequently comes at the expense of the pieces having energy.

 

Add in the almost cut-and-paste aspect of many of Boris' figures, and this is why the earlier work seems to much better to my eye. He wasn't so worried about being slavish to his reference material. He was more dynamic and even exaggerated, and less fussy about getting the smoothest skin tones he could. Probably because he just hadn't evolved to that level. Not unlike a guitarist playing with punk rock fury, or rocking and rolling, before getting into the super technical wheedly wheedly shreddy guitar solos that really only appeal to a select few, and put everyone else to sleep, or seem clownish.

 

Later Boris is wheedly whee to me.
He rendered the hell out of this, but it's just not good structurally. You can smooth everything out with time and technique, but if you start off with figures flexing on the ground and stick them up in the air, it doesn't mean they'll look like they are leaping. Nobody jumps like this...

And this gets into a big reason why I don't have too much cape art. So many of the poses and gesticulations are so goofy, they don't seem dynamic to me, they seem silly. I like artistic distortions. Pushing things beyond reality even, and heavy stylistic executions. But to me the takeaway stylistic execution of later era Boris is cheese, and lots of it. It's no accident that people like the Vacation poster. It's what I think Boris really excels at, which is spoofing that style of art, as a master of it. He couldn't be any better positioned to do so. A willingness to pike fun at himself and the genre is one of his endearing qualities in my eyes. I don't want it on the wall, but I definitely respect it.

 

-e.

 

 

 

Edited March 15, 2018 by ESeffinga

[delekkerste]

13 minutes ago, vodou said:

Lack of generational context and imprinting aside, I can easily see several Frazetta and/or similar quality oils, correctly framed (contemporary, so not the way anybody has ever done it before!) per wall here. To add color and break up the swaths of "white".

"correctly framed" = 

It's unbelievable how many poorly/ugly-framed pieces of art there are in our hobby.  Seeing comic art (including strip art and painted art) framed in those faux antique-looking gold frames like Old Masters is THE ABSOLUTE WORST.     

[vodou]

36 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

"correctly framed" = 

It's unbelievable how many poorly/ugly-framed pieces of art there are in our hobby.  Seeing comic art (including strip art and painted art) framed in those faux antique-looking gold frames like Old Masters is THE ABSOLUTE WORST.     

My framing aesthetic is that the frame is an extension of the wall not the art. Just like dress socks are an extension of the slacks not the shoe