Book Review: Something to Keep the Coffee Table Company

The Future of Fantasy Art

In high school, one of my art teachers would always have his own work on an easel at the front of the classroom. While his students were busy misrepresenting the human form again, he would pick up his oils and paint. His specialty was futuristic spaceships, and he would sell the finished pictures as cover art for science-fiction novels. Having seen the originals, with glaring rocket boosters and azure skies, it was always disappointing to see them reduced and degraded on the front of a mass-printed paperback. He admitted that it wasn't the way he would prefer his work to be seen – the magnificence and imagination was somehow stripped away – but it paid the bills.

The book jacket market is still healthy for science-fiction and fantasy artists and has been supplemented in recent years by card-based fantasy games, all crying out for art. Volumes like this give that work a little more space to breathe and regain some of what was lost in the shrink. Cards probably deserve a large format even more than some book covers do: After all, it's pretty hard to make out any detail on an inch-square Magic: The Gathering illustration. What may be a little disappointing to some readers is that, while the tools have changed as more artists go digital, the state of fantasy art is still a little hidebound and could probably do with some new tropes to play with. Yes, it's dragons and goblins and leather-clad elven warriors, oh my! But when the best and brightest of the artists included here flesh those old warhorses out, like Sven Geruschkat proves with his Disney-aping photorealistic CGI Evil Witch, the conventions can still have life breathed into them. Same with the elegiac Victoriana of Simon Dominic Brewer's The Last Dragon, in which aging gentlemen in top hats poke at the corpse of a rotting draken in the gray autumn dusk. While many of the memes stay the same, what becomes most apparent may be the new influences. Muscle fetishist Frank Frazetta and prog rock artist of choice Roger Dean have left their finger marks on the canvas, while Alphonse Mucha and the Pre-Raphaelites remain as pivotal to the more fanciful and fairy-filled end of the genre as always. But it's hard not to recognize the brutal impact of Francis Bacon on Raymond Swanland's sinister Written in Bone or the Alberto Vargas-style cheesecake playful sexuality of Daniela Uhlig's Blindman's Bluff, in which bees and pixies frolic. This collection not only draws together all these diverse offspring of the fantasy masters but gives them the large format and glossy presentation that they truly deserve.