The Eyes of the Artist

An article in June's Imagine FX features the much-esteemed artist couple Boris Vallejo and Jullie Bell. I was quite surprised to see Julie Bell, especially, working on such incredible traditional medium fantasy art, since I think I can vaguely remember she had a website of her own with some very good anime tutorials (ah, the days when I was all hardcore in anime art). She's now married to prodigy artist Boris and together, their creativity has synergized into something almost alive. They push eachother forward and bring new perspectives to eachother's view of life, which inevitably manifests in their art.

The fantasy genre, aptly described as "freedom", allows this creative energy full reign as their subjects depict strong men and women as partners (a reflection of their own marriage). Their clouds, textures, enviroments and creatures are truly the stuff of dreams, yet the photorealistic human figures are so real it's almost as if this vision of freedom were attainable. And they paint so well with traditional medium that it makes this digital artist want to bite her stylus in half and get married to box of oil paints.

When asked about where they get their ideas, Boris had this to say:

"That's a question people always ask," says Boris. It's also one that can't be answered: "To tell you the truth, we don't fee that we come up with ideas. The ideas come to us." You have to be a conduit: "The ideas are already there, we are vehicles for them."

Julie seems surprised that anyone could ever lack for ideas: "it's like every time you turn your head you see something. Out of hte blue you'll just look at a stain on the table and it'll look like something and you just go 'oh my god'." And off you go.


What I think can be learnt from this is that creativity is not something that comes from within, it's something that comes from without. To see the wonder in the world and let it work through you and your art. Maybe fantasy art isn't so much the representation of dreams or 'fantasy' as something unreal, but reality shown to us in all it's beauty. It may seem hard to see the wonder in things so mudane, but artist Jason Chan, a personal favourite of mine, show us that it's not in Imagine FX's May issue:

"In a way," says Jason Chan, "my art is a way for me to show people my mind and how my mind interprets the world." That interpretation is rich with something we all too easily overlook in our daily lives: "The feeling of otherworldliness and mystery."

"Fashion, people I know and life experience, I can draw influenced from anything." Jason channels it through into that fantastic mental filter and out it comes: "If anything sparks my interest, you may see it in my painting." Art is the expression of a person's experience.

His piece Angel Flight was inspired from his observation of a fence on an overpass.

Therefore, it appears that to be 'creative', to be able to show everyone the world as you see it, you need to take see the mundane through your own mental filters, seeing the artistic wonder of the world around us. And to see the wonder of the world around us requires a certain something, and I think Terry Pratchett described what that something is very accurately in his description of the Discworld character Leonard of Quirm:

Any sensible ruler would have killed off Leonard, and Lord Vetinari was extremely sensible and often wondered why he had not done so. He'd decided it was because, imprisoned in the priceless, enquiring amber of Lenoard's massive mind, underneathe all that bright investigative genius was a kind of wilful innocence that might in lesser men be considered stupidity. It was the seat and soul of that force which, down the millenia, had caused mankind to stick it's fingers in the eletric socket of the Universe and play with the switch to see what happened - and then be very surprised when it did.