Karen Haber Reviews Visions of Beauty by Kinuko Y. Craft and Found Worlds: Todd Lockwood by Todd Lockwood
Visions of Beauty, Kinuko Y. Craft (Borsini-Burr Inc/Imaginary Realism 978-9-0784600-0-8, $225.00, 294pp, hc) January 2022. Cover by Kinuko Y. Craft
Kinuko Y. Craft: Visions of Beauty is massive with a capital M. You could use it for weight training. This coffee table volume has enormous visual impact and impressive production value. It’s a statement-making career summation for a giant of fantasy art. From the dust jacket to the gilt-edged pages, bound-in bookmark, golden endpages with ghostly images, the entire package is beautifully designed inside and out. The color reproduction is superb, as is the paper quality.
Fans of Kinuko Y. Kraft’s celebrated artwork have waited a long time for a retrospective that befits one of the most acclaimed and awarded artists in the field.
Craft’s romantic, intricate, detail-laden images take viewers away to marvelous worlds. Among the many memorable publications and covers for fairytales included here are Cinderella (2000), Sleeping Beauty (2002), and Beauty & The Beast (2016). The impact of details in these works can be felt even in two-page spreads, where they have the effect of gilded embroidery.
Also included: an index of paintings with medium and size supplied, a list of Craft’s many awards, including Grandmaster Spectrum (2002), World Fantasy Award Artist of the Year (2011), and the Lifetime Artistic Achievement Chesley Award (2016).
The heavily designed volume is full of details and framing elements taken from Craft’s paintings, coordinated colors, and quotations from Craft. There are several photos, including a full page one of the artist and others of her with her dog,
The book is filled with embellishments, details, marginalia, and framing devices, all taken from Craft’s artwork. This is a compleat work of art, albeit a very large one.
Found Worlds: Todd Lockwood, Todd Lockwood (Self-published 978-1-7347870-0-9, $99.00, 352pp, hc) October 2022. Cover by Todd Lockwood.
Found Worlds, a deep, sweeping look at the inspired artwork of Todd Lockwood, is one of the most impressive group-funded books I’ve seen this year.
The artist is the recipient of more than 15 Chesley Awards including the Lifetime Achievement award. Lockwood has also received two World Fantasy Art Show Awards. His work has appeared on New York Times bestselling novels, industry magazines, and fantasy/science fiction games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. He’s a double-threat creator, writer as well as artist, as proved by his novel The Summer Dragon (DAW, 2016) which he wrote and illustrated. On a personal note: I provided text for an earlier book on his work, Transitions (Paper Tiger 2003).
The color and image reproduction here are first-rate. The design of the book is confident and stylish, with the artwork well featured, one image to a page or in double page spreads, and all identified by title, date, medium, and dimensions. Excellent satiny paper and solid production work overseen by the artist himself has resulted in a triumphant career retrospective. The endpages feature shadowy images from Lockwood’s work. Preliminary sketches accompany some of the finished art, and a complete index of the works is supplied.
Lockwood’s heroic fantastic art is filled with action and emotion informed by his appreciation and experience of role-playing games. This artist is on a first-name basis with dragons and imbues them with majesty, power, humor, terror, and unforgettable physicality. His oeuvre contains much more than leathery wings, claws, and teeth, however. Heroines, villains, and elven warriors are all depicted from jaw-dropping angles and with brilliant use of color and light. Engagement with his subjects is obvious. Each person is an individual, filled with emotion
One look at the series of covers he did for R.A. Salvatore’s popular series on the warrior elf Drizzt, featured here in two-page bleeds, shows what a master of action, movement, musculature and mood this artist is. Other memorable paintings include ‘‘The Wayward Knights’’ – a masterpiece of foreshortening and Lockwood’s entree into working for TSR; ‘‘The Fountain Chamber’’, an illustration from his novel The Summer Dragon; and two of my personal favorites: ‘‘Transitions’’ and ‘‘Not So Byzantine’’.
Friendly and affectionate commentary from artists, art editors, and writers is sprinkled throughout the book, with generous details about his development as an artist, finding his way into a career in fantastic art after a childhood spent sketching, and a life-changing experience early on playing D&D, working for TSR and then Wizards of The Coast.
Found Worlds: The Art of Todd Lockwood is a triumph of design and content, the career retrospective that this artist has long deserved.
Karen Haber is the author of nine novels including Star Trek Voyager: Bless the Beasts, and co-author of Science of the X-Men.
She is a Hugo Award nominee, nominated for Meditations on Middle Earth, an essay collection celebrating J.R.R. Tolkien that she edited and to which she contributed an essay. Her recent work includes Crossing Infinity, a YA science fiction novel of gender identity and confusions.
This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.
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