dividedbyblue: Painting ‘Blue Divided By Blue’ by Mark Rothko (Rothko)
Dawn ([personal profile] dividedbyblue) wrote2025-05-06 12:59 am

Which artists do you like or did influence you?

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: Which artists do you like or did influence you?

In my youth, I was enchanted by classic fantasy artists I found while being subscribed to a fantasy art newsgroup (Yes, it was long ago). I don’t remember all of their names, but I know the first art book I bought was one of the Hildebrandt brothers talking about their Tolkien Calendar that they did in the seventies. It was amazing. They talked about their process of painting scenes from The Lord of the Rings, using reference pictures in which their family members posed for sketches, which they made into paintings. It had the quality of fine art, but in the fantasy genre. I still have this book. It’s torn, and the pages are loose. But I still look through it from time to time.

It greatly influenced me, but sadly, I left creating fantasy art behind when I went to study art. It was frowned upon, and it was not ‘real art’. It was useless, they said. There was no market for it. I never lost the fascination. Larry Elmore, Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo & Julie Bell, Jesper Ejsing … I still look up to them a lot. Their work is fantastic.

Regarding traditional art, I love Breughel, Mucha, Egon Schiele, Edward Hopper, Aubrey BeardsleyGiorgio Morandi, Caspar David Friedrich, Mark Rothko. In comics, I love Grzegorz Rosiński’s art.

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