Tuesday, May 11, 2010

R.I.P. Frank Frazetta

It's almost too hard to pick just one image to sum up the power of Frank Frazetta, and yet they all do. Particularly what I liked about Frazetta's work was once I really started looking at it, beyond just the cool bad ass imagery that caught my eye as a youth, was how well he used color, composition and mood. Most fantasy artists never progress beyond the desire just to paint cool things. Frazetta really used warm and cool colors to create a dynamic composition, depth and a focal point that your eye keeps landing on every time you looks at the painting. Just look at that image and tell me your eye can keep from stopping on the man riding the flying creature. The subdued and cool greens and pale ochre-ish yellows on the man and the lizard are surrounded by an intense abstract lava flow of bright red, itself surrounded by a pitch black border that contains the image. Like any good artist, the more you look at a Frazetta image the more you can keep looking...