Maxwell Parrish Mazda Calendar Illustrations

Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) was primarily an illustrator, though he made fine art paintings and many of his illustrations followed the tedious, exacting technique he used for his fine art work. For some background information on Parrish, see here and here.

Parrish's oil painting technique was classical in that he first created an underpainting. One example of an uncompleted Parrish painting I've seen had the underpainting done using blue rather than sienna, green, gray or other common alternatives. Atop the underpainting, he applied layered glazes and perhaps a few spots of thicker oil paint. Given the long drying time between layers, a Parrish painting or illustration could take many months to complete (he usually had a number of works progressing simultaneously).

For about 15 years Parrish created the illustration for a calendar distributed by General Electric promoting its Edison Mazda light bulbs. Below are examples.

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I don't have dates for these

1919

1921

1924

1925

1932

1933

Up Close: Manchess at the Society of Illustrators

I like Greg Manchess' way with brushwork, having written about him here and here.

Lucky me, I was subjected to a 24-hours layover in New York City when returning to Seattle from Paris last month, and was able to visit the Society of Illustrators' digs on East 63rd Street where they are holding an exhibit of Manchess' works through 26 October.

The paintings were scattered around the walls of the upstairs dining room. Lighting conditions varied, but I tried my best to photograph details in such a way that his brushwork was revealed. Below are some of my photos. I decided not to include images of complete works, because that doesn't concern me in the present case. The small images below approximate a distant view; click to enlarge to observe the brushwork in more detail.

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As you probably noticed, Manchess likes to work with square-tipped brushes, though he uses other brushes when needed, especially for details. His level of experience has reached the point where his brush strokes are both economical and decisive. I envy that.

George Stavrinos at Society of Illustrators

Fashion illustration, aside from pattern packets and low-end catalogs, has traditionally assumed the form of stylized, often sketchy pictures. So back in the 1970s and 1980s I found it interesting when paging through The New York Times to find fashion illustrations that were tightly drawn. They stood out due to their contrast to the ink wash drawings that populated other advertisements, and were signed "Stavrinos."

That would be George Stavrinos (1948-1990), who died young thanks to his lifestyle choices.

His works and biography can be found in issue number 41 of Illustration magazine. And the Society of Illustrators has an exhibit devoted to him in its New York gallery: it closes 19 October.

I recently visited the Society's digs to view works by Greg Manchess, but took time to take a few photos of the Stavrinos display.

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A nice touch was a drawing board/work area re-creation.

Here are two detail shots of the above.

Besides finished drawings, the exhibit had some workup examples showing reference photos, an intermediate study, final art, and a clipping of part of a published ad. Note that Stavrinos hewed closely to his reference photos. That was necessitated by his very tight rendering style that left little room for inventing details in garments folds and so forth.

In the Beginning: Howard Terpning

People have differing opinions regarding when New York City went to hell (I say it was around 1965) and the same goes for what span of years represented the Golden Age of American illustration art. However, most observers seem to agree that the illustration party was pretty much over by 1970.

So what was a (previously) successful illustrator to do when the market for his work was in a state of collapse? Some migrated to doing cover art for books. Others went into portrait painting. And a few, including James Bama and Howard Terpning (born 1927), the subject of this post, left the New York area to do Western fine art painting.

Biographical information on Terpning can be linked here and here. He was part of the last generation of traditional illustrators, those just old enough to have establish themselves by the early 1960s when the market for their work started to crumble. For instance, he was born the same year as Bob Peak; both Peak and Terpning (for a while) taking up the slack by doing movie poster art (See Leif Peng's post on Terpning's posters here.)

Peak died comparatively young, but Bama and Terpning were still alive when this post was written. From what I've read, Bama is no longer active, but Terpning continues to paint and his works have been well received by buyers favoring Western art.

Terpning focuses on American Indians as subject matter as the images below suggest.

Signals in the Wind

War Stories

Status Symbols

Now for examples of Terpning's illustration work.

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Beer advertisement

Poster for "Cromwell" - 1970

Poster illustration for "The Sand Pebbles" - 1966

"The Wild Bunch" - 1969

Bar scene

The first illustration is a pretty conventional 1960-vintage work that might have been done by other good illustrators. The movie poster art make use of compositional clichés of the time, and Terpning used a smoother, less painterly style that probably was in line with his clients' expectations.  The two lower illustrations use a sketchy style popularized in the 1960s by the great Bernie Fuchs.  So Terpning was both skilled and versatile, but never quite attained a distinctive style.

Ed Valigursky: Illustrating Real and Imaginary Technology

Illustrator Ed Valigursky (1926-2009) originally focused his efforts on science-fiction and other speculative subjects. Eventually he drifted over to depicting aircraft and other real-life technological objects and became one of the best in that business. Unfortunately, I couldn't find many examples of his aviation art on the Internet, so what's displayed below will have to do for now.

My take on aviation art is that there are several approaches to depicting airplanes. One is the "show all the rivets" hard-edge style. I suppose this appeals to the crowd that loves seeing details. The other extreme is what I'll call the "French watercolor" approach where hardly any details are seen, and the details present are inaccurately drawn. My conjecture is that the audience for this is comprised of people who do not like or understand airplanes. Then there is a middle ground where aircraft are portrayed as they might be seen in real life at a glance, with one area in focus, others de-emphasized. A master in this was R.G. Smith who I mentioned here. Valigursky's aviation art fell in the range between the rivets school and Smith, presenting his subjects clearly and with artistic flair.

Below are examples of his aviation art along with science-fiction and other subjects as context.

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Stukas
To set the scene, here is one of his aviation paintings.

Amazing Stories cover - December 1956

"Space Viking" cover - 1963

"The Cosmic Computer" cover - 1964
The two lower covers are examples of his better SciFi work. Sometimes he dashed off cover art with sad results, as can be seen in the topmost cover.

Saga magazine cover - September 1953

Nautilus - for Saga, April 1959
Two illustrations featuring submarines.

"Flying in Flanders" cover

"No Parachute" cover

"Full Circle" cover

P-38s and Messerschmitt
More aviation art. The lower two examples are the kind of Valigursky illustrations I like best. But to nit-pick, the P-38s seem to have 1942-43 vintage U.S. markings, yet the serial number on the tail of the near aircraft has a 1944 fiscal year serial number indicating when its construction was budgeted.

Other Savage Illustrators

Fictional heroes can come and go. A few come and stay. One such hero with staying power is Doc Savage, whose stories were written by "Kenneth Robeson," the pen name of several writers, but predominantly Lester Dent. I previously posted about Doc Savage here.

I would imagine that readers familiar with Doc Savage visualize him in terms of James Bama's depictions such as on the book cover shown above. Bama's first Savage cover appeared in 1964 and was followed by 61 others over the next 30 or so years. Subsequent images of Savage by other artists in other media retained Bama's concept of Savage's appearance.

The original Doc Savage illustrator was Walter Baumhofer who did the cover art for the Doc Savage pulp magazine series from 1933 until he began moving from pulp to "slick" magazines around 1936-37. Background information on Baumhofer can be found here, here and here.

The image above is a typical Baumhofer Doc Savage cover, this for May 1934. Since Savage was described as the "man of bronze" in the stories, referring to his coloration, Baumhofer indulged in a degree of artistic license by introducing violet shaded areas in his paintings to contrast with the bronze hues required by his subject.

For what it's worth, I consider Bama and Baumhofer (and not necessarily in that order where Doc Savage is concerned) as the best of the lot over the first half century of the character's existence. Which implies that other brushes were in the game.

The best of these was Robert G. Harris, a talented illustrator who had little choice but to follow Baumhofer's Doc Savage characterization and style, as can be seen in the two covers above. Biographical links for Harris are here and here.

Quality began to noticeably slide to my eyes when Emery Clarke became the main cover artist. His images are a little less distinct, lacking the punch Baumhofer and Harris delivered.  One source contends that the figure in glasses in the upper image is a self-portrait of the artist.

Last and least among the Savage illustrators I located (and I must have missed some others) was former (almost bomb-throwing) anarchist Modest Stein, whose colorful career is described here. Whereas Baumhofer's images were classy (especially considering their pulp magazine locale) and Bama's were monumental (and not much like the physial description of Savage in the stories), Stein's strike me as little better than smudges in many cases, a step down from Clarke's work.

Werner von Axster-Heudtlass: Illustration Political, and Not

This is an advertisement for Eagle artistic silks, 1925.

And here is another piece by Werner von Axster-Heudtlass (1898-1949). My German was never good and now it's pretty rusty, but I translate the top slogan as "Hate and Destroy our Enemies" and the bottom one as "Freedom, Justice and Bread (for) our People." The "enemies" are labeled Judaism (in a secular sense, "Jewdom"), Bolshevism, Plutocracy and Capitalism.

I don't have a date for this Hitler Youth poster, but guess from the content that it was created before Hitler assumed power, probably sometime between 1927 and 1933.

What little is known about Axster-Heudtlass can be found here, though I suspect researchers in Germany might have dug out more. The link notes that he and his wife Maria (no dates) probably collaborated on some of the Axster-Heudtlass works.

I recently posted about Ludwig Hohlwein, a top-notch advertising illustrator who also created posters supporting the Nazi regime.  Hohlwein, as I noted in the post, did posters that were supportive in a positive sense and he steered clear of negative subjects.  This was not the case for Axster-Heudtlass who, in the poster above, depicts enemies that are evil serpents that must suffer destruction.

Below are examples of normal commercial art by Axster-Heundtlass along with one more Nazi propaganda piece.

"Merry Germany"

Steinway Pianos

Railway guide cover - 1936

Advertising the port city of Stettin (now in Poland) - 1934

This is another poster or flyer supporting the Nazi regime, probably from 1944-45. It's more difficult to translate than the one above, but goes something like this: "We listen to you, Leader. The future can bring us nothing save victory. [This next phrase is the tricky bit: help me, please, if it needs fixing] And if questioned as to its basis, we state: Because the Lord God gave us the Leader." "Leader" being the reference Hitler bestowed on himself -- Führer in German.

I am not fond of what might be called "political art," the political message almost always draining whatever artistic merit might have been incorporated in the work. Some artists do political art strictly to bring needed income, as if the assignment were just another form of advertising that required illustration. Others are in favor of the cause, as we see above. Axster-Heudtlass did some nice commercial work, but the Nazi pieces are clearly inferior. How much of this artistic damage was his own doing and how much might have been owed to the taste of clients is probably impossible to judge at this late date.