Walking Therapy: Art, Illustration and the Great Masters of Fantastical Art

Transcript

Nobody gave me sin for this That’s reason why I tried both This is all that’s old, I can see a thousand times of this This is all that’s old, I can see a thousand times of this As may or may not have been apparent from my recent episodes at first I spent some time recently immersing myself in the wonderful world of AI generated video This was initially as an experiment And a bit of demonstration material for a podcast episode and video But inevitably and predictably had me, at least for a short while, completely sucked in I don’t really want to talk too much about that, it will be covered and will have been covered in various other episodes What I will say is that after some very successful initial experiments, which were a lot of fun And with differing levels of quality, but all stuff that I felt quite amused and pleased to have produced I started trying to more seriously create something Rather than just throwing down random ideas that had occurred to me at that moment And quickly found that there’s a huge delta between producing high quality, low instruction content By that I mean, if you say to the model, produce me a picture of a rabbit in a meadow I might even tell it that the rabbit has wings or something And that’s about it, then what you get is actually pretty good And it’s a lot of fun doing this, terrible for the environment But if then you go, well, OK, I want this rabbit, I do want it to have wings, but they need to be the wings of an eagle And I want it to take off, and as it takes off you can see the ground below it and you realise it’s in the desert And it had taken off because it was being chased by hordes of coyotes And that the rabbit itself was actually a shade of purple The coyotes could fly and they flew after it and there were mountains There was some fighting action and it happened like this, that and the other You quickly realise that there’s almost no level of specificity that will please the model while also pleasing itself And the poorly described imagery is excellent But trying to get what you want without being extremely prescriptive will produce very odd, unsatisfactory and often terrible results The colour looks shiny and cool, but just wrong And there’s a real hockey stick there And here it lies, one of the core problems with the new breed of generative AI I said it wasn’t going to get into that, but I largely stopped at that point Because I realised that I was burning a bunch of carbon to achieve either random shit Which I’d already done and was quite comfortable with And that was burning carbon to not get what I wanted And ultimately I had no plan for that content Anyway I just thought it would be cool to make a piece of amazing video So I just stopped I’ll maybe delve into it again if I feel like I have a real use case And probably just to check in at some point to see how things have moved on Since things seem to be moving quite quickly And so that’s sort of the end of that part of the story But what I wanted to talk about here was that my experiments with gen AI drew me towards certain areas of my imagination And my artistic taste and sensibilities And I didn’t really think very hard through Because I was trying to produce things quite quickly I knew I was being distracted on a journey I didn’t really have time to be on So I didn’t think too hard about the things I want I just went with what I was gravitating towards And so my first sort of freeform experiment Excepting that the stuff that I built specifically for the podcast and it extended upon Was ultimately Lovecraftian, dark, weird, fictiony, bleak, odd, alien landscapes And odd undulating, recursive motifs, languages and scenery And did a half decent job of it It was all a little bit cartoony but it was fun But it didn’t give me what I wanted, funny enough And I sort of stopped with that one because I realised that I wasn’t really sure what I wanted It just wasn’t that And so there’s the first clue My first instinct was to try and build something darkly ominous and alien And then my second experiment was immediately trying to create alien landscapes and put someone in it And I had this desire to have a planet with an astronaut In a sort of sleek, retro-futurist space suit and a bubble space helmet On a planet reminiscent of Star Trek at its earliest and most imaginative And films like Forbidden Planet and various other A and B level science fictions of the 40s, 50s, 60s And I didn’t think very hard about this I just gravitated towards that And I had no interest in portraying a scene of a near-futuristic modern space suit And a, you know, a reportage near-future stroll on the surface of Mars or the moon I’d wanted hardcore retro-futurism And so I described an alien landscape of wild colours and plants and strange rock formations And retro-futuristic rockets and space suits and weird squirrely 60s sort of post-art deco pop culture design And as I sort of continued trying to construct this thing just within the words I was creating to feed into the model Ultimately this space lady, space girl encounters a gigantic statue of Cthulhu And there we find ourselves full-circle back into H.P. Lovecraft If you don’t know who H.P. Lovecraft is, he was a writer of pulp, weird fiction literature in the early part of the 20th century Who created a whole esoteric mythos that combined real human history, religious beliefs, occult beliefs And cosmic science fiction storytelling and world-building And he was quite a master at this And anyone who has any interest in horror or the darker edges of science fiction Whether or not they’re aware of that is very much a fan of Lovecraft or at least his influence And authors like Stephen King are very, very influenced by Lovecraft Stephen King’s work, especially as it progresses through the middle to late period, is highly indebted to Lovecraft But there’s plenty of other Lovecraftian authors out there Ramsey Campbell springs to mind and even people like Clive Barker Probably a bunch more modern ones that I’m not aware of Anyway, this gives a close to where at least my aesthetic sensibilities lie Because somewhere between the gloomy cosmic horror of Lovecraft, August Durlath, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard Probably better known for creating Conan the Barbarian, Lord Dunsany, more latterly Robert Block, Fritz Lieber And on the science fiction side, the writers in publication such as Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Starling Wonder Stories And various equivalent fantasy publications We have the golden era of sci-fi, horror and fantasy pulp fiction Authors such as Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick, Frederick Pohl, Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asimov The real founders of the genre as we know it And I’m a big fan particularly of science fiction literature both from that era and before and right up to modern times But really here, I’m not necessarily so drawn to that stuff Especially when we’re talking about my failed enterprises at AI video world building It’s actually the covers that adorned those serialized fiction publications These were little magazines, either short stories or serialized, longer stories, many of which would become novels in their own right But while the golden age of science fiction writing was occurring, so was a golden age of science fiction illustration Since back in these days, there were no computers to generate it And if you went into an art gallery, as is still the case now, for the most part, you would only see either abstractified or impressionistic, modern art and art antiquity What you most certainly wouldn’t have seen is pictures of tentacled aliens accosting, sleek-suited, space girls and muscular, heroic, Buster Crab-like, Flash Gordon, space heroes And yet there was a huge industry around this Every month many publications came out and as well as that we had book covers which often came from the same wellspring of visual imagination and movie posters and the like As well as illustrations inside the publications themselves and comics of the time too There was an outpouring of fantastical imagination and those covers of those periods I just adore and have done since I was a kid I always found when I saw a book or a magazine or even a movie with a fantastical cover painted by an artist with real talent That to then consume the thing that it was advertising and illustrating, I was always horribly disappointed Just Google the main poster of classic sci-fi rendition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest called Forbidden Planet It’s one of the more, if not most respected, science fiction films of all time and a definite precursor to the original Star Trek The cover of that is a contender for my favourite piece of art of all time It’s so idiosyncratic, so of its time but so beautiful and colourful and stylistic It just fills me with all these emotions And yes, some of that visual style is present in the movie but it rarely feels quite so well realised for all the obvious reasons And so the film to me I kind of liked but I’m not a Shakespeare fan I thought it was a bit slow but stylistically it’s amazing, Robbie the Robot was a cool creation But the cover with Robbie the Robot with a stricken woman in his arms is just drilled into my imagination There are literally hundreds of covers and illustrations from that period that I just love more than almost any other piece of art that exists And these were artists that, outside of a fairly small cult of followers, have been largely forgotten And these include some of my favourites, L.K. Bergy, Ebert Rogers, Frank R. Paul, Virgil Finlay, Lucille Franke and lots and lots of others whose names I struggle to keep my mind partly because they’re so bloody many of them And partly because they’re not always there in popular culture being talked about for their amazing artworks If you see a Rembrandt or a Constable or a Mondrian or whatever it is The type of art that’s going to get regularly seen by just everyday people with a vague interest in art or even those who don’t There’s many of them, particularly artists like Van Gogh and Warhol Most people can point at that and say that’s a Van Gogh Even if they’ve never seen the picture before, but the sunflowers, that’s Van Gogh It’s a contender for the most likely artwork to be mentioned if you ask someone to just name a random artwork and the artist that made it Yet some of the most important pieces of art that exist, most people wouldn’t have a clue who made them For example, the iconic posters of Spielberg’s Golden Era, Lucas’s Golden Era, the mainstream posters for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, all of those movies Pretty much everything Spielberg did after maybe Close Encounters, the ones that you would recognise were all done by one artist An artist called Drew Struzan, who’s still, I believe, active today So I just wanted to interject here because I don’t think I gave Drew Struzan’s legacy anything like the credit that it deserves So I’m just going to take you through a few of his major works that I’m pretty sure you’re going to recognise In front of me I have a book called Uvre, O-E-U-V-I-E, that’s the French word, by Drew Struzan and his wife, Dylan This big fat hardback book that has all of his major posters in it and various other works 2004, no idea if it’s still in print So let me just waft through a few, just in the order that I see them He did album covers as well, so we’ve got Alice Cooper’s Welcome to my Nightmare, Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits, the first greatest hits, which has got an amazing cover Black Sabbath, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, so a few for the metalheads there Then we get into the movie posters, Indiana Jones, all of them, The Thing Rambo, or is that first blood? I think that’s first blood Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, Pirates of Penzance, Hook, Spielberg’s Hook, not a great film I ordered Star Wars 4, 5 and 6, that’s A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption, the classic 80s He-Man adaptation Back to the Future, parts 1, 2 and 3 Muppet’s Christmas Carol, Muppet Treasure Island, all of the police academy films, Coming to America with Eddie Murphy Well, certainly the first Harry Potter film is in here, presumably some or all of the others Various bits, if not all of the covers for Lord of the Rings, lots and lots of private works and commissions And probably a whole bunch of really famous ones that I’ve just scanned through and missed But you can’t underestimate how iconic the work of this guy is and how few people are likely to have a clue who he is, if you mentioned his name Yeah, I guarantee that most people are more familiar with his work than most of the artists held up as being the most important whoever lived I think Struzan’s influence permeates our culture these days in ways that people don’t even think about I mean, do you really think we would have the Marvel films in the way that they are if it wasn’t for him? And the absolute dominance of fantasy sci-fi and horror and superhero culture that has its roots in the works of Spielberg, Zemeckis, Lucas, James Cameron in the 80s and 90s It’s where our popular culture comes from to date. Stranger Things would not be a thing if it wasn’t for all those directors And the work that Drew Struzan did that brought the people into the cinema that gave us that fantastic imagery that made you really want to see the film Incredibly life work, like incredibly competent but artistically absolutely magnificent So yeah, I’m going to shut off about Struzan now, he’s one of my heroes, back to me walking around Yeah, if you ask anyone, put in at the poster, yeah I loved that poster and I loved that film That if you then ask them who made the painting, the vast majority of people won’t know And the same goes for all the imagery created throughout science fiction, fantasy and horror history But not just those, also pulp westerns, romances, war stories, the other genres that exist out there There were hundreds and hundreds of artists working through the years Getting paid a pittance, a lot of them were salaried, whose artworks hardly ever got shown in galleries and hardly ever still do But there are some specialists in this stuff, there are dealers and there are collectors, as there are for the publications themselves But many of the originals just got thrown away, a lot of them were done on, painted on, on board, cardboard on using gouache Which is not a particularly hardy form of paint and probably left in a drawer somewhere after they’d been photographed and used for the cover Some of them had multiple leases of life and there are certain images by certain artists that seem to get used over and over again I’m thinking of the weird squatting alien one by Bruce Pennington that seems to just turn up everywhere Frank Frazetta’s artworks, he was particularly known for his fantasy works but did a lot of science fiction as well His artworks turn up all over the place, out of times I’ve seen them on album covers and various other things reused on books and stuff And I guess Frazetta’s one of the few artists of that era that actually does have any level of name in his own right And rightly so, and his art has been very influential in both defining the style of fantasy and science fiction art But also the imagery and the law of fantasy itself, how people think about fantasy And so, you know, it’s not without its superstars, but still it goes ignored by the art establishment And there’s this line seemingly drawn between, over here we have art and over here we have illustration Now obviously art covers a pretty wide range of stuff, but if what we’re talking about is a visual arts, particularly painting, drawing, that type of thing There’s a very clear distinction in many people’s minds and particularly in the art establishment’s minds Over here we have art, and art is good, and art is creative, and art pushes boundaries but it elicits motions and compliments poetry People can stand in galleries with a weird booklet in their hand and a chin cupped in their other hand Nodding sagely as the person next to them gestures at the canvas in front of them and says something seemingly erudite That they probably just read off the plaque at the site, and that’s art And then on the other side you’ve got what’s sneeringly called illustration There’s nothing wrong with that word illustration, there shouldn’t be If you’re an illustrator, good on you But it’s used as a pejorative in a sense by the art community of the erudite, nodding kind There’s something other and lower, this is not part of what we do, this is not part of our culture So these artists, these illustrators are sort of written off by art history, they have some books written about them I’ve got many, many, many books on science fiction, horror, fantasy, illustration, and they all rank in my favourite books I love them, this is where I go for ideas, this is where I go for an emotional fix This is where I go to get taken to another world, and more so than I think the things that they represent The worlds that I can see that have been dreamt up by these amazing imaginations and then put down onto a surface in such a beautiful way With so much diversity and so much passion, and I get drawn into it and I want to be there I want to be in the paint and I want to climb into it, Mary Poppins style And I don’t very often get that with what we’re calling art, paintings of the respectable kinds And it harks back to me as a kid, just learning what art and drawing and painting was and who I was surrounded with And what excited me, and that stayed with me, but I learned to appreciate everything else It encompasses the art world, even if I don’t like it And I on this podcast take a very broad interpretation of what constitutes art and creativity for good reason But like everyone else, I have tastes, and those tastes inhabit a certain area And for many years I’ve been a little bit hesitant to talk out loud about the fact that my tastes look very much in the area of what is near that As illustration, you know, illustration, that’s not art, that’s stupid aliens and cowboys, it’s for kids We used to say that about comics until creators such as Alan Moore turned up and made it, at least Quasar, respectable But it shouldn’t take that, comics were already in an art form, in their own right So what, that they were originally aimed at kids, their output is now culturally the biggest thing there is, it’s propping up The movie industry, characters that were created 70 odd years ago by the likes of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Yet still they’re written off as geeky, nerdy stuff Not real art, just kids stuff and weirdo stuff But what of the fact that people like me, all those nerds and weirdos, prefer that Get the same emotional rush, if not a bigger one, from consuming this so-called non-art As someone who’s looking head tilted in awe as a giant canvas by side twombly Which is largely empty other than some, oh look, childlike scribbles The art world proper can play around with simplistic, childlike or retrograde stylings, movements and depictions That many people quite rightly point that and go, my kid could have done that Now I’m not going to get into why that isn’t really the case, but it is a valid assessment And since the galleries, the world over is filled up with large canvases, stuff with things that many people would consider childish To then point at science fiction illustration and call it childish seems a little bit ironic don’t you think And it’s quite possible one day in the future that some of these artists and some of their followers will become seen as respectable in such communities And art dealers will be scratching each other’s beards off to obtain an original But the fact is it never should have been the case that these artists were relegated to some second, third, fourth tier From a creative artistic perspective, many of them were pushing boundaries further and earlier Especially given the constraints of their art form and what they were able to do given these things needed to be in a form that they could adorn a book or magazine cover I think there’s also a sense that this stuff can be easily now reproduced by an AI or someone with Photoshop and a bit of skill And I think good science fiction art is as much a connoisseur’s game as good sculpture And as I discovered creating good science fiction with AI is incredibly difficult It’s also arguable that the majority of my painted works to some one degree or another have completely failed attempts to capture some of the magic I see or saw in those artworks And I’m going to call them artworks not illustrations But most of the time it’s just me not being able to do as good a job as my heroes And I’m fine with that, and I don’t want to copy them And I know I can’t, I’m unlikely to be able to do what they do But it’s the trying that keeps me going and that’s what I’m trying, what I’m trying to do So I’m out, I’m out as a science fiction art nerd and he’s celebrating and I need to celebrate it I couldn’t give two tosses what the art establishment thinks is worthy Nothing gives me as much pleasure as that type of art and has been the case since I was not even a teenager So join me in celebrating these forgotten masters Maybe you don’t like it and that’s fine, but please don’t write it off These artists were amazing and they still are Maybe we can be the revolution and give their legacy the exposure it deserves Stay out there people Art against mental illness