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The Chesley Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Art:
A Retrospective
by John Grant and Elizabeth
Humphrey, with Pamela D Scoville;
Foreword by Ron Miller
(AAPPL, $45.00, 192 pages, hardback; September 2003.)
Review by Randy M Dannenfelser
We live in an exciting time for fantasy  and
science fiction art. The number of highly talented practitioners who
freelance for book publishers, movie studios and individual patrons
today is as high as it has ever been in memory. We who appreciate such
work are most fortunate to be able to enjoy the imagination-expanding
creativity of such gifted artists as Kinuko Y. Craft, Vincent Di Fate,
Bob Eggleton, Frank Frazetta, Frank Kelly Freas, Donato Giancola, James
Gurney, Don Maitz, Michael Whelan, and others too numerous to list here.
We are also fortunate to have an organization that has chosen to honour
these practitioners with a prestigious annual award.
Almost twenty years ago, the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Artists (ASFA) presented their first awards in various categories of
achievement to notable wizards of the art of the fantastic. Since then,
much of the finest work in book covers, interior design, colour and
monochrome artwork and three-dimensional art has been recognized with
a Chesley, ASFA's prestigious trophy -- named in honour of Chesley Bonestell,
the father of celestial art. Since 1985, nearly sixty professional artists
have garnered one or more Chesleys, while many others of remarkable
talent have been cited as nominees. The awards ceremony, held each year
at Worldcon, is a program item to be enjoyed by artists and patrons
alike for whom fantasy and sf art is more than just an augmentation
to the written word.
Now AAPPL, a comparatively new publisher on the scene, has commissioned
John Grant, an award-winning hand at assembling genre-related encyclopedias
(The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney Animated
Characters, et alia), and Elizabeth Humphrey, herself a former president
of ASFA, with assistance from Pamela D. Scoville, co-founder of the
Animation Art Guild, to produce a precious jewel of a book. The Chesley
Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Art: A Retrospective is an
immaculate, amazingly inclusive celebration of nearly two decades of
Chesley award-winning art, painstakingly gathered and faithfully reproduced.
The paintings, illustrations and sculpture found within are a veritable
feast for the imagination. Grant and his associates have also managed
to obtain the insightful comments and explanations of many of the artists
featured, a feat facilitated in no small part by the friendships each
has cultivated from many years' work within the genre. Malcolm Couch's
subtle gallery design effectively underscores the quality of each piece
of artwork included. And Bonestell biographer (and Chesley and Hugo
award-winner) Ron Miller's insightful foreword on the life of the legend
for whom the award is named is concise and informative. The Chesley
Awards delivers what you would expect from an all-star production
team, and then some.
But ultimately it is the artwork itself that makes this book valuable.
We are treated to such impressive paintings of fantastic worlds as Tom
Kidd's textured Middle Earth-like cover for Cole and Bunch's The
Far Kingdoms (Cover Illustration, Hardcover, 1994); James Gurney's
famous motion-filled Byzantine Waterfall City (Colour Work, Unpublished,
1989); and Bob Eggleton's Over the Rainbow (part of the artist's
display for his 1999 Outstanding Achievement Chesley), whose media are
provocatively identified as "oils and human ashes". There is Escher-like
work, too, as in Rob Alexander's Sinja's World (Colour Work,
Unpublished, 1997), wherein a child is drawing on a sidewalk either
a starkly realistic three-dimensional sub-street level staircase and
door or an escape route to a world of imagination. Michael Dashow's
The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche (Cover Illustration, Paperback,
1998), for Peter S. Beagle's story collection, stands out for its whimsy,
as Todd Lockwood's Death Loves Me (Interior Illustration, 1997)
does for portraying the erotic and mysterious nature of its subject
(Death, in the form of Persephone) in support of Tanith Lee's story.
The authors have chosen to feature the Artistic Achievement winners
-- the grand prize of the Chesleys -- with anywhere from seven to thirteen
significant paintings for each of the years in which they won. Therefore,
the work of Maitz, Gurney, Frazetta and Freas -- the only multiple-year
winners -- covers almost one-third of the book. This is not a bad thing,
especially if you are an admirer, like I am, of the work of these four
gentlemen; it's just the way the numbers worked out. As a result, the
work of the remaining fifty-two Chesley winners fills the other two-thirds
of The Chesley Awards.
This time with Humphrey at his side, Grant has once again effectively
combined precise scholarship with marvelous visual entertainment to
bring us a crackling sit-through, although his skill and perseverance
as a researcher comes to the fore here. One can only imagine the frustrating
difficulty Grant and his team encountered in obtaining the rights to
reproduce the work of the nearly sixty artists contained in the book.
In his preface to the second appendix (Chesley Awards Nominations 1985-2002),
Grant hints at the difficulty, as he writes:
This listing is as complete as we have been able to make
it -- and certainly more complete than any other we have been
able to discover -- but we're aware that there are still lacunae
...
Let me say that the "lacunae" are in no way obvious -- not, at least,
to this reviewer -- much the same as when a concert pianist is the only
one in the theatre who knows s/he has hit a wrong note. As a first appendix,
Grant and Humphrey provide informative thumbnail biographies of the
artists covered.
I rarely refer to a book as being "valuable", but The Chesley Awards
certainly is. It is at once a historical sourcebook for the most creative
artwork of the past two decades and a superb gallery book capable of
giving hours of entertainment. I understand the hundred or so copies
that were available at last year's Worldcon in Toronto sold out quite
soon after the convention opened. It was an incredible feat by an incredible
book. All involved in its creation have good reason to be proud of it.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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