Dungeons and Dragons Art Review - Jeff Easley, from Masterful to Derivative

 I started this blog years ago and it found a brief following because of the D&D art. I was focused on the four great oil painters from TSR's Pit. After all that time I never dedicated a post to Jeff Easley. The man was a master. He still may be, but his best work was done 40 and 50 years ago. My absolute favorite was the first orange spine AD&D book we bought, first because of the cover below, and then the content. I loved the art inside and out. 

The book came out in 1986, four years after Jeff Easley began working at TSR. I guess he did the painting as an on demand cover, but it is so foreign to most AD&D or D&D adventures of the time. It's way more imaginative than most encounters in the game would be.What is the monstrosity clinging to the mountain top? Don't know. Makes it scarier.  This is so much more evocative than run-of-the mill D&D. The vista, with river meandering off into the sunlight, the peak rising into a thunderstorm with lightning streaking down, the old bones and treasure chest merging into earth. Note that not only one of the adventurers is doomed to be either eaten or, more likely, tossed to his death, but that another is already falling to likely death in the lower right corner of the cover. In true Easley fashion, the primary warrior's armor has no basis in reality or game mechanics. I just love this one.  It is a major departure from the great art D&D books featured in their earlier years which generally depicted scenes that could be pulled directly from the game's mechanics. I enjoy both types, but Easley's vision is just so much more imaginative. 

Here's the best Jeff Easley painting I've never seen before until writing this post:

Jeff Easley 1981 cover from the late-era pulp, Creepy, done around age 27

Jeff Easley started working for TSR in 1982 with encouragement or an invitation from his friend Larry Elmore. Wikipedia states that the masters in TSR's Pit had him painting gemstones on the borders to the Endless Quests books. Look at that gorgeous painting above. They wasted this man's talent on border decor? That did not last long though. Easley was soon working on every cover painting to AD&D's collection of orange spine books, eleven in all by my count. Every one of these paintings is a masterpiece. Check out this link to Scott Taylor's Art of the Genre that looks at his top ten of these covers. He states there are two that did not make his list. One is Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis' Dragonlance Adventures. I cannot figure out what that twelth book might be.  

Of the four greats, Easley, Elmore, Caldwell, and Parkinson, Jeff Easley stayed with TSR the longest, even doing a few covers for Wizards of the Coast when they bought D&D in 1995. But by this point Easley's hot streak was over. He was becoming derivative, going through the motions, no more creative spark. 

Jeff Easley became so Easley in style, composition, and genre that the later TSR Pit artist Tony Szczudlo was able to distill Easley exactly, almost like a paint-by-numbers. I think his intention was homage to the master, but still....

Tony Szczudlo getting every element of Jeff Easley just right. I like it. The pieces from Szczudlo that shine through are the details in the hands and face of the warrior, tatters on the cloak. Easley was not one for detailed human anatomy. 

Did I get this wrong? Are the best Jeff Easley paintings later in his career? I think it's a hard argument to make. 

Another Easley favorite of mine graced the cover to the AD&D Dungeoneer's Survival Guide. Again, it looks very little like something from Dungeons and Dragons, and aparently that's because Easley painted this before joining TSR.  Again I think this amplifies the imagination and creativity. 

Here I will stretch beyond Easley's AD&D orange spine covers. Easley painted undead skeletons and magical power better than anyone, ever, at TSR. He combines them both in this painting.

The Magister, a AD&D Forgotten Realms supplement published in 1988. 

Another example of Easley setting magical power to the canvas. This is paint, nothing digital. Very cool. It's just magical. I'd taken oil painting lessons before as a youngster and did some decent landscapes. I simply cannot imagine how he does this. 

Cover to the Dragonlance module New Beginnings, published in 1991

To my mind, Easley's cover painting to the 2nd Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide is simply the best book cover ever for TSR. 

Jeff Easley's Wizard and Dragon, first published as the cover to the AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide in 1989. 

Last of all, here is a personal favorite. I just love the look on that big guy's face. This is also Easley's best strong female figure, a rarity for him. For compaison, turn to Art of the Genre and Taylor's article When Jeff Easley Had a Girl. 

Jeff Easley's Cutting Things Down to Size, an interior the 1989 AD&D 2nd Edition Players Handbook

Coming across in all of Jeff Easley's paintings is that he makes up for the lack of true skill with human figures and even clothing with his mastery of composition, color, dynamism, and storytelling. Overall he is consistently my favorite of the four greats from TSR's Pit. 

Time Passes Again

 It's rare that I have the time and head space to reflect. This is one of those weeks, separated from family while in training  for my next assignment to Mozambique. Should I have so much time while in training? I did ask why our courses go only six hours instead of eight, and the reply was so that we could schedule consultations. I did my consultations a few months ago. Here I sit, trying to keep myself occupied and relatively active. Researching pulp artists, seeing again the huge array of beautiful paintings done by N.C. Wyeth, and making that connection again between youth and creativity. For me it was time well spent. Now if I could only be a little more creative myself.

I'm still hung up the amazing, almost divine ability for the young to create. I was listening to the song Poncho and Lefty, made famous by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard when they were in their fifties, or perhaps late forties. However, the song was written by Townes Van Zandt, and he reocrded it in 1972, around the age of 28. Lyrics to the opening verse. "Breath as hard as kerosene." Where did those words come into his mind? It's amazing. 

Living on the road my friend
Is gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron
Your breath as hard as kerosene
You weren't your mama's only boy
But her favorite one, it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye

Townes Van Zandt

I'm stuck on western music, as in "country" music, because the lyrics to so many of these songs felt lived in for many rough years, but these guys were young. Here is Mr Bojangles by Jerry Jeff Walker. He recorded the song in 1968, but must have written it some time earlier, as it was about an encounter he'd had in a New Orleans jail in 1965, when he would have been 23. These are lyrics from the second half of the song. 

We spoke in tears of fifteen years
How his dog and him
They travelled about
His dog up and died

He up and died
After twenty years he still grieves
They said i dance now at every chance and honky tonks
For drinks and tips

But most the time i spend behind these county bars
Cause i drinks a bit
He shook his head and as he shook his head
I heard someone ask please

Mr Bojangles
Mr Bojangles
Mr Bojangles
Dance

I knew a man Bojangles and he danced for you
In worn out shoes
Silver hair, a ragged shirt and baggy pants
The old soft shoe

He jumped so high
He jumped so high
Then he'd lightly touched down
Mr Bojangles
Mr Bojangles

Jerry Jeff Walker

The Creative Peak (Fades)

There is a wonderful art blog I enjoy reading called Art of the Genre. I have no idea who the author of the blog is, but he is well connected to the RPG scene and artists there-in. He also publishes RPG and fantasy art collections under The Folio. Quite a few years back, perahps a decade ago, I read a statement from the author to the effect that painters are at their prime in the early years of middle age, let's say late twenties through the thirties. After that they generally do not improve on their craft or vision, and may even begin to have a decline in their powers. 

The Folio #18, this cover is taken from an old pulp novel. 

The statement left an impression on me. As a general statement, Americans as creators and artists seem to be their most creative through their thirties, but are especially potent in their late teens to early twenties. I won't say this for the entirety of the United States' history, but certainly from World War Two onwards, as our culture has become ever more youth focused. 

Think about it. Who are our great artists over the last 75 years - music, literature, film, visual art? Music is easy because at least pop music has such a youth focus. But leave pop music aside. Hank Williams and Miles Davis dominated their respective genres of American music starting in their early 20s. Classical music is a far more complicated genre, but famous American composers Aaron Copeland and Philip Glass were both hitting their stride around age 35. But we can go well back in time. The "father of American music", Stephen Foster, was born in 1826. He wrote most of his most famous songs at the age of 24 - Camp Town Races, My Old Kentucky Home, etc. With film, look at Stephen Speilberg. He was making near full length films as a teenager. He directed Jaws at age 30. Orson Welles was directing Broadway theatre at the age of 21, did his infamous radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds at age 23, and co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane at the age of 26! For the visual arts, Andy Warhol was making a splash in New York city by the age of 26. 

So far these examples have been completely male focused. Staying with the visual arts, but going feminine, we have the long-lived painter Georgia O'Keeffe, who was embracing her style by 1915 at the age of 28. The real direction I want to take these thoughts is to fantasy pulp art. One of the early leaders was Margaret Brundage who did well known covers for Weird Tales Magazine, and was in fact the most used cover artist for the pulp mag in the 1930s. She started painting for Weird Tales at age 30. 

Three covers from Margaret Brundage. They are certainly pre-Frazetta in style but also show an early obsession withthe sensual female form, even by a female artist.

Now let's turn to the god of pulp painting, Frank Frazetta. He was already changing comic book art in his late teens with far more dynamic figures and muscleture. At age 35 he had moved on from comics and pulps and started his famous paintings for the Tarzan book covers. I'm no art expert, but to my eye Frazetta's painting style continued to evolve, peaking in the 1970s,  or perhaps 1980s with his Death Dealer series, though the general style and composition of these works were not so different from his first Conan the Barbarian painting done in 1966 at age 38. 

Early Frazetta pulp cover

Frazetta's Tarzan the Invincible, 1963, doing movement with the human figure rarely seen before.

Is there any doubt - Frazetta's Conan the Barbarian, 1966

Desperation, painted in 1971

       The Sacrifice, painted in 1980

Cat Gril II, painted in 1990

Moving backward once more, the painter N.C. Wyeth of the Brandywine School and perhaps the greatest "fantasy" artist prior to the Frazetta revolution, was doing pulp covers in his teens, and then some of his most famous western genre paitings in his early 20s, and did his enduring illustrations for Treasure Island around age 28 or 29. 

1909 pulp cover by N.C,. Wyeth, around age 27

N.C. Wyeth's Tarzan

N.C. Wyeth's take on Jim and Long John Silver

N.C. Wyeth's The Passing of Robin Hood, beautifully done around 1917, about age 35

Here I want to emphasize the point that human creativity rests mainly with the young. I didn't stumble on this maxim until I was in my 40s and feeling depleted mentally and physically, creativity largely spent. The real creative juices seem to begin flowing after we've transitioned through puberty and are ready and randy for procreation. Need more proof? Italian renaissance painters - Michael Angelo was 33 when he started painting the Sistine Chapel. Da Vinci was 30 wpphen he completed his first major painting, and painted the Last Supper of Christ at age 40. Raphael started painting chapels for popes in Rome at the age of 28, dying at age 37. Looking north to the Low Countries, Rembrandt was 36 when he painted The Night Watch. Vermeer was 33 when he painted Girl with a Pearl Earring. All of these artists were painting as youth and doing fairly amazing stuff as teens. 

I conclude that young passion and young love, and a mind (or brain) just crossing the threshold of maturity are the keys that open the flood gates of creativity. Oh to be young!

Dungeons and Dragons Art Reveiw - The Thigh Master, Clyde Caldwell

 I've come this far and can ignore this painter no longer - Clyde Caldwell. If Larry Elmore is fundamentally a painter of landscapes and Keith Parkinson a painter of trees, then Clyde Caldwell is in pure essence a painter of womanly thighs. The teenage youth I was blessed him for that. 

Clyde Caldwell was one of the four great oil painters from TSR's Pit days, and my least favorite of the bunch as I poured over D&D art.  Caldwell did some sci-fi works for TSR's Gamma World, but is most known for his high or epic fantasy works featuring scantily clad women with exposed cleavage and thighs - really well done thighs. However, as a teenager who put a lot of time into Dungeons and Dragons, my chief love and concern was creating maps. And maps make me think Caldwell. Clyde Caldwell's best paintings for TSR are the covers he did for the D&D basic rules Gazetteers. As a collection of paintings for the same product and theme, I would say they are the best art work to ever come out of TSR. It's not just that they all include maps as part of the overall composition, it's the variety in each painting that evokes senses of place, culture, adventure, danger. It is the use of color across each painting, the harmony of disparate parts coming together. The brushwork and human anatomy are good, noticeably better than his earlier work. While figures are fairly static, there is still a dynamism in the flow from one image to the next. It's great stuff. And the women are all alluring.

Below are three of the Gazetteer covers I've taken directly from Caldwell's website. None of these are my favorites, but they give an idea of the collection as a whole. The first is for The Grand Duchy of Karameikos. This was the first in the gazetteer series that TSR published, so I assume it was also Caldwell's first painting in the series. Also here are the Orcs of Thar and The Minrothad Guilds. 

Good works, but not my favorites. Those come here, in the order of third, second and first faves. The images are smaller and are the actual gazetteer covers. We have the Five Shires, the Northern Reaches, and the Elves of Alfeim. Note that the last two feature thighs in classic Caldwell fashion. Note the colors.  I also love his more worldly take on halflings (hobbits) and his more aggressive take on elves. For the Northern reaches it's the colors, and the more historical Viking images juxtaposed with his awesome female warrior who appears in classic Caldwell fashion and adds the fantastic tone to the composition. 

Clyde Caldwell's The Elves of Alfheim 

Beyond the Gazetteers I'll add a few of my other Caldwell favorites, more typical of his style from early works right up to the present, although he did do covers for TSR's Ravenloft adventures that employed a similar compostion style to the gazatteers around the same time period. The major changes I see over time in Caldwell's work is moving towards harder, more defined lines and more detail. I don't think his compsotion and capture of the human form was ever any better than the several years he did the gazetteer covers in the later 1980s and early 1990s. 

One I especially enjoyed from my teenage years

One of Caldwell's famous and iconic Dagon Magazine covers

One of my favorite Dragonlance paintings by any artist

This is a personal favorite and guilty pleasure due to the female character with staff. It's by no measure Caldwell's best painting and is not well know. For me there is no way around it, the gal is just sexy as hell. This is the cover to the D&D adventure Earthshaker! I'll note that the lady has a strong resemblance to one of Larry Elmore's common female subjects and muses, who I understand is Mrs. Elmore, his wife. 

I'll add one of Elmore's examples as the final painting for comparison. I believe the title is Gold Mountains, which, besides the rocks painted gold, also points to the female figure's top. I love this painting so much that if i can ever find a decent copy of it I'll do a post dedicated to it alone.  Another interesting tidbit on Elmore is that he now paints figures from real models, whereas his earlier works, which included his wife, he painted more from his inner vision. It's no secret that his earlier works are better. Please don't take any of this as fact. These are items I vaguely recall from a TSR art book I had over thirty years ago, and in more recent years Scott Taylor's blog, Art of the Genre. 

https://artofthegenre.com/blogs/news/when-larry-elmore-had-a-girl

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Book Review - Around the World on a Bicycle

The Germany of the Lederhosen.  Norwegian subsistence farmers. These are two images that leap to mind from the beginning of Fred Birchmore's autobiographical telling of his bicycle adventures that started in the mid-1930s as he was doing a master's degree in Europe. The visions in his book seem impossibly far away. It's shocking how much human culture changed coming through World War Two. 

As Birchmore makes his way steadily eastward from the Balkans to Egypt, Iraq, Persia, Afghanistan and more, his descriptions seem ever more removed from the modern world. As someone who has lived in Egypt, I understand the allure of seeking the distant past in our present, feeling the timelessness of a place. How many times did I hear that Egypt had not changed for hundreds of years, or since Jesus walked the land in nearby Judea with His disciples. To some extent that yearning to see the past comes through in Birchmore's tone. However, much of it is simply pure description, and the world of the 1930s is shockingly removed from our own. 

An old friend of mine passed the Around the World on A Bicycle to me this past Christmas. We both have connections to Athens, Georgia. I heard Birchmore's name previously, largely connected with the 1996 Olympics but never with his massive bicycle rides. There are occasions in the book when he thinks back on his home in Athens before he turns his thoughts to the next horizon in front of him. Those were the passages that I could most identify with; not just those glimpses back into memory, but also the deep-seated desire to press onward into the unknown, leaving the nagging sense of loss and homesickness to the wayside.

I passed the book to my father, who is also a cyclist. I was surprised to learn that my father knew of Birchmore. Not only that - he also knew of the bicycle Birchmore used on his round the world ride. It had one gear. One gear! I thought back to the epic mountain passes that Birchmore described crossing. He never mentioned gears, perhaps because basically no one had multiple gear bicycles in the 1930s.  This man Birchmore was a beast. I am shocked yet again, this time by what no one today would even dream of doing, cycling up those passes on a heavily loaded, one-gear bicycle. And he did this in lederhosen, one pair of German leather shorts from Germany to Vietnam. Fred Birchmore, you are one of my heroes. I wish I knew more about your bicycle rides when we lived in Athens in the 1990s. I surely would have looked you up and asked for stories of your adventures, and gone on some bicycle rides. 

Dungeons and Dragons Art Review - Tony Szczudlo

 Where did Tony Szczudlo come from? Is that last name even real? 

I was thinking about this because my daughter previously drew fantastical scenes and stories starting from around age four. They were really cool and had a lot of action. Now she mostly sceteches just individual people or faces, or just hands, just feet, trying to figure out how to accurately capture the human body and human movement. 

So, this reminded me of TSR's big four oil painters from The Pit - Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, and Keith Parkinson. Most of their work is either static or involves action in a fairly limited scope without much detail going on in the background or the margins. Easley departs from this quite a bit, but his detail washes into blurs in the background very rapidly. Parkinson has a few more active pieces with a wide scale. Elmore has some really nice dynamic pieces, but they focus on just a handful of characters and the backgrounds tend to be much more static or, to be very precise, scenic landscapes. 

That's where Tony Szczudlo comes in. He did paintings for TSR's Birthright Dungeons and Dragons setting. This would have been later 1990s, not too long before Wizards of the Coast bought TSR. Birthright started as a deluxe boxed set. Szczudlo's cover is a masterpiece in its scope, color, and detail. It captures what so many of our D&D games tried to build to or include, these massed combats and castle sieges, the player characters doing their best to contribute to victory or just survive. In general, Szczudlo's painting style actually reminds me of Jeff Easley in terms of round, constrained forms, and blurred or impressionistic backgrounds. But Szczudlo's mid-grounds have so much more going on, and his foregrounds are so full of little details. Szczudlo's work is also much more visceral and horrifying. He love's the blood, the screams of pain and terror. Because of this, a lot of his paintings and drawings are not up my alley. I don't go in for horror, blood, and gore. But his Birthright paintings are awesome. It's a shame he worked for TSR as it was sinking under its own bloated weight of settings and splat books. I would have loved to see what else Szczudlo could have contributed to outside of Birthright.  Wizards didn't use him at all. Maybe Szczudlo's aesthetic was too disturbing to parents. I'll include one of the covers for another Birthright project he did to give a feel for it. 

(Actually, doing a little extra sifting through the internet shows that Szczudlo did paint for Wizards, but small pieces for card art, and nothing visceral.)Now, let's take a look, shall we? 

Tony Szczudlo painting his cover for Birthright. 

Detail of the corner Szczudlo is working on with the first photo.

Complete Birthright Painting by Tony Szczudlo. Scale here does not do it justice. 

Cover to a Birthright companion book Legends of the Hero King

And now some paintings that approach Szczudlo's Brightright painting, but are simply no match in scope and detail.

Jeff Easley comes closest, but for all that is going on here, for the most part it's dozens of figures with swords at the ready, Laurana the sole exception as she cuts down a draconian in the foreground. I believe this was the original cover art to Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis's first ever Dragonlance novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight. 

One of my favorite's from Keith Parkinson. I wish I knew the title. The idea here is similar to Szczudlo's Birthright painting, but the scale here is very personalized, only focused on the two figure's in the foreground. There is a sense of battle taking place in the background, just enough of a hint. This is the cover to an interior book in TSR's first boxed set for the AD&D Forgotten Realms setting.

A classic from Clyde Caldwell (I pulled this directly from his website), the cover to the first AD&D Dragonlance module, Dragons of Despair. This is the most action I've seen in a Caldwell painting, and the background of ruins and waterfalls is quite stunning. But in terms of scope, it's a far cry from Szczudlo's Birthright painting. 

This is the only Larry Elmore painting I can think of that works at a similar scale to Szczudlo's Birthright. I know its title as The Savage Frontier, the cover to a Forgotten Realms setting book. It may also be a cover to one of the AD&D high-level adventures for the Bloodstone Lands. I love this painting and we referenced it frequently as we thought of settings and what the composition might be to a dark army we would have to face off against. That said, Elmore has many nicely posed figures with little dynamism and no violence. 

Time Passes

 I'm sitting here with my daughter, Solvieg, who is now fourteen. She's sketching randomly in a school notebook. I write randomly, but she is very focused on what she is doing. This is one of her favorite things, just sketching. She's good, does mostly people. She works on heads and hands at various angles, tries to capture movement in the body.

 I'm looking out an apartment window at a rainwashed sky, vibrant green leaves with drops of water resting on them poetically before evaporating or blown away in a breeze. It's a temp apartment. We've been here seven months now while I'm in training for my next assignment, U.S. Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique. 

My younger daughter, Sage, is still at school finishing up a computer coding class. She's not much for computers, but because they are creating computer games she's stuck with it. Sage likes crafts; anything with paper, but also knitting, sewing, sculpting, whatever. Are we ready for this next big move? We only came back to the USA from Hanoi, Vietnam, last August after doing a three-year tour there. The girls made good friends and it was hard to leave. 

Shin is out shopping for items that we'll take to Mozambique, getting us ready. She will pick up Sage on the way home. Time Passes. It reminds me of a song I found on the internet by Jerry Ramsey called Time Marches on. I'm sure it's a cover. Yup. It's written by Bobby Bradock and first recorded by Tracy Lawrence. He does the song very well, but not like this Jerry Ramsey character. Here's the lyrics and a photo of Jerry Ramsey:

Sister cries out from her baby bed
Brother runs in, feathers on his head
Mama's in her room learnin' how to sew
Daddy's drinkin' beer, listenin' to the radio

Hank Williams sings "Kaw Liga" and "Dear John"
And time marches on, time marches on

Sisters usin' rouge and clear complexion soap
Brothers wearin' beads and he smokes a lot of dope
Mama is depressed, barely makes a sound
Daddy's got a girlfriend in another town

Bob Dylan sings "Like A Rolling Stone"
And time marches on, time marches on

The south moves north, the north moves south
A star is born, a star burns out
The only thing that stays the same
Is everything changes, everything changes

Sister calls herself a sexy grandma
Brothers on a diet for high cholesterol
Mama's out of touch with reality
Daddy's in the ground beneath a maple tree

As the angels sing an old Hank Williams song
Time marches on, time marches on
Time marches on, time marches on
Time marches on, time marches on