Dungeons and Dragons Art Review - Trees and Parkinson

 I did it! I've finally found a decent copy of this Keith Parkinson's painting that graced the cover of AD&D's REF2. I have been looking for a copy on the internet for over 12 years and all I could find were little postage stamp sized thumbnails. Check it out in all its beauty.

A couple things of note here. My brother and I had a copy of REF 2 AD&D Character Record Sheets; I think we picked it up at a toy store at Crossroads Mall in Boulder, Colorado. But we never played AD&D. We played the basic, expert, and companion rules from D&D. It was Keith Parkinson's cover that drew us to buying this AD&D product. The character sheets were damn cool too, providing a tantalizing glimpse into the more complex, "adult" version of the game. This was almost like a Playboy magazine for us. For several years this was the only AD&D product we owned. To it we added the Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, two meaty rules and setting creation books with gorgeous cover paintings by Jeff Easley. But at that point we were playing David "Zeb" Cook's AD&D 2nd edition.  We never played Gary Gygax's advanced game. 

But back to Keith Parkinson and his art for D&D, or TSR at large. It's my understanding that Parkinson was one of four oil painters who TSR's Art Director, Jim Roslof, added to its art division ("The Pit") in the early 1980s as D&D took off into mainstream America. The other three oil painters were Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, and Clyde Caldwell. To this list should be added Jim Holloway, but I'll save that for another post. 

Anyhow, these four guys provided the covers for the large majority of TSR books published in the 1980s and created the visual entrance for D&D. Their art grounded D&D in the 1980s,  in an esthetic that was more level with Tolkien and his knockoffs, such as Terry Brooks and his Shanara series, than what D&D had previously been, which was more a sword and sorcery idea set amid dungeon mazes; think Fritz Lieber's Fafherd and the Grey Mouser or Glen Cook's Black Company series, I guess. Probably you could just look at Gary Gygax's infamous Appendix N list of books to get a sense of what esthetic was driving D&D prior to it going mass market in the 1980s. The four greats from TRS's Pit took D&D out of the dungeon and into the light of a more real world. This was espacially the case with Parkinson and Elmore whose paintings so often feature landscapes, and trees. 

 Suffice to say that the four oil painters of TSR's Pit did some beautiful work that wouldn't put off parents by depicting demons, murder, and mayhem; all D&D staples before going mainstream. Parkinson and Elmore in particular did those landscapes that were just on the Frederick Remington side of a Thomas Kinkaid paining, or harkened back to N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle illustrations for Robin Hood, and King Arthur, etc., something that may have resonated positively with parents buying D&D books for their good kids. The look seems to have put off many old school D&D gamers, but I loved it!  Just look back to Parkinson's painting for REF 2, it's both gorgeous and evocative; hints at danger just off the edge of the canvas, while the horses with their gear and the distant mountain speak to a long journey into wild lands of adventure. 

Parkinson departed TSR's Pit to go freelance in the late 1980's, and later went into game design, including computer games as co-founder and art director for Sigil Games, which made Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. He continued to do oil paintings for book covers, individual commissions, personal work, and of course computer game covers, most famously for EverQuest. He passed away in 2005 at age 47 due to Leukemia. He was a giant in the fantasy art world and one of the four greats at TSR.  His esthetic is not for everyone. I see it as a beautiful realism with hints of the magical and fantastic. And trees. Here are two later Parkinson paintings with some amazing trees and foliage.

Return of the Banished. Well executed subject, and the finest of pine trees you will find in fantasy and sci-fi art. It reminds me that I read Keith Parkinson was a fan of Western oil paintings, or the Old West in general, and the landscape here speaks to that.

Demorgan's First Spell. This one one of my favorite Keith Parkinson paintings for sheer beauty. It also hints at a story, though not one of danger. The tree in the middle ground is classic Parkinson, and the foliage in the background is wonderfully lush and detailed. 

As a parting memory, one of my all-time favorite Parkinson works: The Flying citadel from his days in TSR's the Pit and Dragonlance. This is taken directly from Parkinson's website.