Dungeons & Dragons Art review - The Landscapes of Larry Elmore

Still awash in memories, I've decided to tackle them from a more obtuse angle by getting back to thoughts on fantasy (make that D&D for now) art work. There is a newly dominant cadre of gamers that refers to themselves as the Old School Renaissance, or the OSR. Although newly emerged, these folks are all older, took up Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970's and early 80's. They look back to the earlier years of role playing games as the best of times, a Golden Age of creativity that collapsed under the weight of its own success. Or, in simple terms, the OSR loves dungeon crawls without the story heavy and heroic plot elements of later years. They prefer more open ended play to the reams of structure that were progressively added to their games with hundreds of rule books and prefabricated settings. They prefer home grown businesses to the the faceless corporations that bought up the more successful role playing games. One standard bearer of the OSR is blogger and game designer James Maliszewski, known as Grognardia. Mr. Maliszewski envisioned a history of role playing games divided into three eras: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, and the Age of Everything Thereafter. The OSR takes its inspiration from the Golden Age, or the age when role playing games and Dungeons and Dragons were born. The age of Gary Gygax, and artists like Otis. Maliszewski harbors a disdain for the Silver Age of D&D, when Gygax was forced out of the company he created, and the popularity of the game reached its zenith.

I started playing D&D in Maliszewski's so called Silver Age. I loved it. The Silver Age took adventures from bleak and restricted confines of dungeons to the surface, where whole worlds of adventure on the grandest of scales awaited. Artists like Larry Elmore captured this spirit more than anyone else doing fantasy artwork at the time.

As I wrote earlier, Elmore's style, grounded in the realist school of painting, carries a sense of the familiar and accessible with it. From his paintings, I could look around my own very real world and easily imagine signs of the fantastic.  Here is the perfect example of what I am referring to.



This is a fairly typical Elmore painting with its wide landscape, a rather humanistic (or naturalistic) take on a dragon, and a group of adventures on the brink of of combat. Note the mountain in the background. It's Longs Peak on Colorado's Front Range. I've see this view hundreds of times. The scenery in Elmore's paintings come straight from my world. Hiking and climbing in the Rocky Mountains as teens, my twin brother and a friend or two would always brings along paper, pencil and dice, settling into a session of D&D if the opportunity presented itself. Even today, when I am outside in nature, I imagine elves behind the trees, spirits in the streams, dwarven caves in the mountains, and so on. Due to Elmore's paintings, when I am in the great out of doors, I am almost always imaging the vaguely magical. In a way it's fun, but it's also distracting and can get in the way of the real beauty of nature that surrounds me.

Below I have included a few of Elmore's classics that defined the Silver Age of D&D. The first is, in my opinion, the very best of any TSR painting Elmore did. None of his other works tells a story and displays as much mood and emotion as this one does. I believe it is called "The Death of Sturm". It comes from TSR's Dragonlance novels.

                Larry Elmore's Death of Sturm

Next, another Dragonlance Painting. This one probably causes Mr. Maliszewski great pain as it represents the ascendance of Dragonlance. This beauty is perhaps Elmore's most recognizable painting. Gracing the cover of the fist Dragonlance novel, "Dragons of Autumn Twilight", it helped to make the books a sensation. It also marked a very conscious turning point in TSR's D&D brand to move into publishing novels, at the same time giving adventures and settings much more epic scale and plot. I'll always remember this cover in my cousin Eric's room. I was six. What else can I say?

Larry Elmore's Dragon of Autumn Twilight

Here is a painting that represents D&D as my twin brother and I played it; stripped down, mostly simple adventures still lacking that epic scope. We never had a player character that advanced beyond 9th or 10th level. This is called "Dragon Slayers and Proud of It". It has a classical quality to it that few of Elmore's other paintings display, most especially seen in the muted tones of light and sky. I rather like this painting, mundane as it is. I suspect that the three bearded figures ere are modeled on three of the four four great oil painters from TSR's Pit, all peers of Elmore's: Keith Parkinson as cleric, Jeff Easley as fighter, and Clyde Caldwell as magic user. 

 

Dragon Slayers and Proud of It!

A solid collection of Larry Elmore's paintings and ink drawings is featured on his website, https://larryelmore.com. The website has the ability to zoom into his work in detail. It's worth the visit.  I wish there were dates on each work so we can get a better sense of his progression as an artist. I'll add two final pieces here both pulled from Elmore's website, both from the early to mid-1980s. They carry light watermarks of his signature, but are as close to the real deal as you can have on the internet. 

Paladin

"Paladin" is a promotional piece Elmore made in 1982 for TSR's AD&D game. It may have been issued as a poster, but was definitely featured in magazine adds. There is something about the angles of the composition that makes the heart soar, or skip a beat and then soar. The goblinoid figures feel stilted, but it doesn't matter as attention is immediately on the horse and rider, then next to mountains and sky.  Elmore tends to do better work with figures in a more portrait style, so this is one of his better action pieces. The mountains are probably not specific, yet they still transport me easily to the Rockies - Rampart Ridge leading to the Signal Peaks for instance.

Waiting for Shadamehr

The final painting here is "Ancients and Innocents - Waiting for Shadamehr". This is a private work Elmore did in the mid 1980s, saying that fellow TSR it artist Keith Parkinson proposed they each make a painting they could run prints off of and sell at GenCon, where they already had vendor tables for their TSR work. That Elmore put time and passion into it shows. That he lives in a world of imagination shows. For me this is Larry Elmore's finest work, or at the very least represents examples of his greatest strengths - scantily clad female. check. Touch of whimsy. check. Figures posed for portrait. check. Fantasy grounded in the familiar. check. Landscape with mountains. check. The female figure here is gorgeously painted, and the details on her fur boots and loin cloth, chainmail bikini top, sword and shield, bits of clothing are just right. That said, Elmore has dozens of works, mostly ink or pencil drawings, for which I could say the same. What sets this apart is the landscape; the narrow mountain vale, dried by summer now turned to autumn, it moves away to a river and wider valley, perhaps opening onto a plain. The painting carries a wonderful sense of distance, hints at the way forward after many miles already travelled. For anyone who has hiked up a long pass, reached the saddle, and paused to look at the other side, this painting resonates. 

Looking back at Mr. Maliszewski's division of D&D into the Golden and Silver Ages, Elmore and his landscapes are the standard bearers of Silver. Of his hundreds of works, I can think of three that depict scenes inside dungeons or caves. Most of Elmore's work is set out of doors and celebrates nature - sky, clouds, mountains, snow, trees, grass, earth. To a fair number of these he adds dragons, so we get the dragons rather than the dungeons of D&D. For most of Elmore's paintings the landscapes beckon powerfully so that even armchair gamers with beer bellies and gray beards would want to visit them. They tie directly to Tolkien's The Hobbit. Tolkien wrote of the the sedate Bilbo; "he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls..."  Indeed it is The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that D&D's Silver Age so freely draws inspiration. Elmore was a key contributor to the creation of AD&D's Dragonlance, which in so many ways are derivative of Tolkien's books. But that is a post for another day.