By Charles Vess, Susanna Clarke
As someone who enjoys the work of popular fantasy illustrator
Charles Vess, I haven't followed his development as an artist all that closely. So a lot of the images compiled within the pages of this 200 page retrospective
Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess were a pleasant surprise. If I had to sum up his oeuvre as presented in this book, it would be that Vess has been extremely succesful in pursuing projects that were suitable to his individual talents. For example, he's returned to
William Shakespeare's ageless comedy
A Midsummer Night's Dream several times throughout his career. That choice is emblematic of him - Vess seems particularly drawn to stories that deal with the intersection between the realms of the mundane and the magical.
One thing that I can relate to some degree are his various artistic influences. Vess cites comics legends such as
Jack Kirby,
George Herriman,
Russ Manning, and
Hal Foster. But he was also strongly informed by the work of classic fantasy illustrators from the late 19th and early 20th century such as
Maxfield Parrish,
Arthur Rackham,
Richard Dadd,
Alphonse Mucha, and
Howard Pyle. Some of his early attempts at comic book storytelling are reproduced, and show that Vess had already learned to blend his comic and illustration influences. Vess exhibited many of the characteristics of his illustration heroes: The lithe figures, pastoral settings, the finely textured pen and ink cross hatching, and the harmonious color palette and subdued tones of his subtractive style of painting. Vess had all the necessary tools to become an accomplished artist. Those youthful efforts contained just the smallest hints of the command for multi-layered tableaux and the mastery of fanciful decorative elements found in his later, more mature work.
One big misstep, from the way he tells it, was enrolling at the department of
painting and printmaking of
Virginia Commonwealth University, where he graduated with a BFA. Whatever valuable technical skills he acquired came at the expense of
disapproval from his peers. At the time the faculty was strongly influenced by the
abstract expressionist movement - the antithesis to the narrative art dear to Vess. "I had to struggle for many years to regain that lost, individual sense of whimsical fantasy that those school years tried to squelch." I guess the
pop art movement had not yet penetrated the walls of VCU's academia.
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| The Fairy Market |
Another odd choice which is only briefly touched on were his attempts to work for
Heavy Metal magazine. The publication's emphasis on sci-fi, combined with a preference for a brighter, more garish palette, buff figures, and a blood-and-guts approach more in line with
Frank Frazetta than with
Aubrey Beardsley (just to name two of Vess' early heroes) seemed like a poor fit. Unsurprisingly, one of the magazine's editors would describe his art as "too nice" for their purposes.
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| They Were Like Knights and Great Ladies out of Some Medieval Story Book |
However, working in the comic book industry allowed Vess to eventually make his way back to the
faerie idiom and narrative illustration, especially when he began collaborating with fan-favorite writer
Neil Gaiman - a professional relationship that continues up to the present. His paintings for Gaiman's novel
Stardust remains his most ambitious, and one of his most successful, bodies of work to date. Along with wider recognition came greater freedom to choose who to collaborate with and which stories were available to illustrate: whether it was the victorian-era
J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, modern emulators like
Charles de Lint and
Susanna Clarke, the darker horror-fantasies of
George R.R. Martin, pro bono work for local community organizations, or his own self-publishing efforts through
Green Man Press. While some of these projects are bound to come across better than others, depending on the reader's own tastes, there's a remarkable stylistic consistency to his art in this later period of his career that speaks to how carefully he's built his reputation as one the industry's foremost fantasy illustrators.
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| The Merry Dancer's Emporium |
While I have my own quibbles with the book's design (I don't particularly care for the cover's color scheme and would have preferred the text to blend into the cover image), there's not much to complain about the content of the book. Susanna Clarke provides a fairly apt introduction. Apart from the reproductions of the finished artwork, there are samples of some of the underlying line art sprinkled throughout the book. Vess indulges the art geeks by concluding with an informative section on how he created the book's cover art. Overall, Drawing Down the Moon is as satisfying a retrospective as any found in today's market.
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| A Dream of Apples |
