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Bodily Threat

by SARAH WAMBOLD

When Frank Frazetta turned down a contract to play professional baseball, artists were making more money than major league players. He lived to regret his decision, often waxing nostalgic about the dough he could have made and the physical satisfaction that playing ball gave him. “It almost beats sex — almost,” he said in an interview about the sport. Sales and sex are at first blush the most noticeable angle of Frazetta’s artwork, but these are his passions. When pushed, he admitted to getting more exhausted from painting, an exercise that used more of his imagination.

A purely commercial artist, Frazetta began doing line drawings of comics. He transitioned into painting after a successful rendering of Ringo Starr for the cover of Mad magazine. From there it was all book covers and movie posters, with his painting’s narrative often eclipsing the story itself. Frazetta was accused more than once of swiping images, but only by the uninformed. He continued to paint with a security of vision hardly capable of copying. Director Robert Rodriguez exhibited his collection of Frazetta's work last week at SXSW, and assembled in one place, the paintings displayed a inimitable security of vision.

This isn’t work that has earned him acceptance into fine art circles, despite raising the form of illustration to new levels of skill and detail. He is still considered one of the best illustrators of his era, an important influence on science fiction fans and a true genius of fantasy representation. All of this is the art world's nice way of putting him in his place among working class artists whose popularity feels relatable.

Critics squint their eyes at the overt titillation in Frazetta’s depiction of women. They unironically call them ‘girls’. All of his females appears with as much physical might as any other figure in his paintings, but they’re also fully formed characters who have their own agenda. In "Swamp Demon", its unclear whether the woman is meant to charm or infuriate the creature before her or which one is the real demon.

Compared to his watercolors, which he preferred to work with, his oil paintings have a certain weight that goes beyond just the paint itself. The backgrounds are deeper, the characters thicker and themes darker. "Death Dealer I" depicts the character on his horse, an enormous animal as menacing as the scythe poised in front, still dripping a rainbow of blood. The world of the Death Dealer deserves its punishment; a similar vibe radiates off the frescos in the Sistine Chapel. It is hardly a jump to go from Frazetta’s drama to Michelangelo’s, they were both painting strictly from their imagination, presenting it as photographic evidence and getting paid.

The exaggerated darkness in Frazetta’s work is born out of the fantasy stories he was commissioned paint, but its the light in his work that is more the mirror of ourselves. An immature hope that appears all around, it pours into a painting like "Fire and Ice" gracefully, shining on mottled demons crawling towards human heroes who think they can fight back.

Americans have always fancied themselves control freaks, a reason the subtlety of an Edward Hopper painting fits more perfectly into their vision of themselves. Unrequited, depressed, leering. Frazetta’s work is too teenage, the threats are too bodily, the detail too ornate. Yet Frazetta grew up in Hopper’s landscapes; he used the same colors and afflicted figures, but preferred to use them in a painting you cheered for, not just observed. 

It would be correct to say that Frazetta achieved the same amount of fame as an artist as he would if he’d have gone pro. Baseball would have given him access to stadium applause, the scoreboard showing proof of his success. With art, he got to work in Hollywood painting monsters. If painting today was as influential, artists would take more chances. More importantly, people would pay attention.

Sarah Wambold is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. You can find her twitter here and her tumblr here. She last wrote in these pages about the decay. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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