Unseen Frazetta

I've spent a large chunk of today writing a story about a trip I took with some friends to New York City in May of 2005, but seeing as how it's not quite finished yet, and I feel like I want to post something, I'll put this up instead. It has been just over a year since legendary fantasy artist Frank Frazetta died. I have several art books devoted to the man, as well as prints and posters of his adorning the walls...I've even got a jigsaw puzzle of one of his paintings.

A documentary film about him came out in 2004, and I wrote up a review of the beautiful 2 DVD set for Unseen Films last October. Since the most viewed post on my blog was one about Frazetta, and with the anniversary of his death, this seems like as good a time as any to put my piece for Unseen Films up here.

Frank Frazetta, who died this past May, was an incredibly talented artist who probably gained most of his notoriety from his paintings of Conan for paperback book covers in the 1960's and 1970's. He did many other fantasy bookcovers, paintings for movie posters, covers for horror magazines, comics, and even had an animated movie based on his art directed by Ralph Bakshi (Fire And Ice, which came out in 1983). But it is an interesting treat to see what artists have to say about Frazetta's art, and indeed hear what Frazetta has to say about the subject as well.

The documentary is a splicing of clips from interviews with contemporary fantasy and comic artists, along with a biography of Frazetta. Frazetta himself is one of the interview subjects, along with members of his family. Many of Frazetta's peers are interviewed as well, and there are also scenes of him wandering around Brooklyn reminiscing about the days of yore with some of them. We even follow him into his mother's home in Brooklyn.

A diverse range of people comprise the interview subjects, from actress Bo Derek, to musician Glenn Danzig, to the creator of The Rocketeer (and the man responsible for the late 20th Century revival of interest in 1950's pin-up model Bettie Page), Dave Stevens. Each relates their own personal way in which either the art, or the man, or both, affected their lives. It's an interesting testament to see how one man had such an effect on a broad range of talented human beings.

The Collector's Edition 2 DVD Set version that this review is based on comes with a large amount of bonus material on the second disc. There are many deleted scenes, outtakes, and additional stories to be told that were cut out of the actual feature to make it flow better. The first disc includes many extended interview segments as bonus material as well. But perhaps the most unique extra feature is at the beginning of the second disc, which shows Frazetta drawing a panther left-handed. After a series of strokes left him unable to draw right-handed, as he had naturally done all his life, he just taught himself how to do it with his other hand...a truly stunning achievement, especially when you consider he was in his 70's when he re-learned how to draw, and could still do it amazingly well.

Again, this review is based on the 2 disc version of Frazetta: Painting With Fire. There is a 2 disc Special Edition of the movie based on his art, Fire And Ice, which comes with the Painting With Fire main feature as the biggest bonus on the second disc...but then you don't get any of these great extras in this set. If the thought of a documentary of perhaps the greatest artist of the second half of the 20th Century seems interesting, you may as well go all out and get the version with all the goodies, and get Fire And Ice as a separate purchase.

Vlad's Paintings

I suppose this MAY have something to do with the impending approach of Father's Day, but I've never been much of a believer in holidays. If you need a holiday to remind you to tell somebody how much you care about them, or to thank them for the things they've done for you, does that make it okay to take them for granted the other 364 days of the year? Not to mention the whole corporate greed aspect of holidays. Corporations prey upon the guilt and insecurities built into the average human, making them feel like they are worthless scum unless they buy cards, flowers, candy, etc., on made up "holidays" devoted to Father's, Mother's, Valentine's, and other such nonsense. This is starting to sound like I've gotten on a soapbox, but isn't that basically what a blog is, an electronic soapbox? Anyway, back to the point...

In my recent post about Frank Frazetta & My Father, I mentioned my father's painting. He did many oil paintings over the years, a number of which hang on the walls of their home in Long Island, New York, and one of which hangs on the wall in my home in Henderson, Nevada. But I thought I'd take the opportunity to show everybody a couple more that he did, as I realized I've got pictures of many of them on my computer. I'd forgotten he had me take pictures of them the last time I visited (over 2 years ago already), so that he could e-mail images to his step-sister who lives somewhere in Southern California.

Many of the paintings that he does are his own versions of classic paintings by many of the masters (I know there's a Picasso, a Hopper, maybe even a Monet). But he also used to randomly see a photo in a magazine here or there that just struck him as something he wanted to paint. The elephant painting shown here I believe came from a photo from a National Geographic magazine. This was done in 1988, and I remember this hanging on the walls of our house in Whitestone, NY for many years. There was sort of a running joke about the painting that, once you knew it, you were completely incapable of seeing the painting the same way ever again. Nothing major, but it does change your perspective about it enough that you really can't see it any other way anymore.

As I said before, he would also do his own renditions of classic paintings. This was his rendition of Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning, and I'm turning over the next part of the story to my Mom here, as I can't really improve on what she said in an e-mail; "Dad painted “Early Sunday Morning” at my request. It is hanging in the dining room where I can see it when we eat there. He did a terrific job on it. He modified it a bit but he captured the essence of the painting and my reason for liking it. Dad’s painting shows two thirds of the width of Hopper’s painting encompassing two plus stores including the barber pole. The store on the left in Dad’s painting would have represented the butcher store my grandfather owned, but was already closed when I was a kid (because my grandfather had retired by then). We played in the empty store as kids. The walk-in meat locker was still there, complete with a window to the inside of the store and a counter below the window, plus a large handled pull-down lock on both sides of the entry door. The store itself still had the counter and old cash register. None of this is visible in the painting but those are the memories it brings back to me. Next door even in real life was a barber shop – it may still be today but I am not sure. It had the barber pole also. One summer on Sunday mornings I walked from home to meet my aunt to go to church with her. She lived upstairs in the front apartment above the closed butcher store. Dad painted his version in 2006. Ode to nostalgia!"


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