…specifically this one? I didn’t take the photo, but it’s from the March, 1993 issue of Disney Adventures magazine. And it’s been bugging me since I was a kid.
The photo doesn’t do it much justice, but the painting did appear (just from memory) to actually be a period painting, or at least a detail of part of one. (I always thought the style looked a bit like Michelangelo, though he didn’t paint Vikings.)
I don’t have the issue on hand, so I can’t get a better picture, or see if there was a picture credit. But I thought I’d take a chance that someone else might recognize it. Can anyone help me out?
It’s definitely *not *a period picture of any sort. I’m guessing just an in-house artist. Failing that, the usual gang of post-Frazetta Fantasy artists are your best bet - your Bisleys and the like…
Whelp, with my tax rebate, I finally splurged and got a back issue. There was no artist credit that I could find—and it doesn’t seem to be in the N. C. Wyeth books I’ve found, so far—but I got a decent scan:
Nope, but definitely not period art. At a guess, I’d go mid-to-late 1980s…which I see is a tad early, but not necessarily wrong (the artist may have had earlier sentiments or the painting may have existed for years before publishing).
It looks to have probably been painted in acrylic paint, with the artist then scraping lines of paint out with (probably) the wooden end of his brush. It looks like he did it in two layers, doing the gold and flesh tones on the bottom, with only the tiniest bit of scraping, letting it dry, and then did the purple-turquoise tones (that are indicative of the 80s) and blacks over top.
I don’t believe that I’ve seen scraping paint off as a technique any time earlier than the Impressionists, and as I understand it oil paint is semi-transparent, so the distinct look of the scrapings wouldn’t be possible with it. Acrylic paints didn’t become available until the 1950s.
And then of course, the line artwork (particularly around the eyes, teeth, and the helmet’s brow ridges) and the circular rather than almond-shaped shows that it’s someone fairly used to doing line-art, like an animator or comic book artist. The grotesque, uneven mouth is fairly remniscent of 70s animation. I’d venture a guess that your artist was born around 1960. Young enough to be painting in the modern (as of the 80s) style, but old enough to remember the 70s.
There appears to be a mirror image set of initials in the lower-right, “GR”.
What does the top say? “bison with xany othek wakships ackoss” (probably “other warships across”…) is what I can decipher, there seem to be a few different rune alphabets mixed here.
This probably won’t help much, and I suspect someone will be able to do a much better job than I just did, but I looked up the runes running across the top of the picture. As best as I can make out, it says:
Doesn’t make any sense to me, but it’s probable I didn’t get the shapes matched up right. I used the alphabets hereto figure it out, but the runes seem to come from various alphabets.
And, of course, it’s equally possible the artist just grabbed letters at random that looked neat rather than trying to “say” anything.
DAMNIT! Spent too much time checking!
Sorry, yeah, the runes across the top of the picture scroll across all the other pages of the article, too; there was a key to deciphering them in a sidebar. I just didn’t crop it out of the scan. :smack:
(“Bison with zatü other warships anross” actually sounds weirdly intriguing, I have to say.)
If you flop the picture (mirror image) the signature becomes easier to read. It definitely says “GR” and it probably says “GROSS” with the “O” being a spiral.
Possibly the name is G. Ross.
I googled “Illustrator Gross” but none of the 5 or 6 artists had the right style/signature.
I don’t think that the spiral is part of the signature. He used thicker lines for the initials than he did for the rest of his scrapings. The spiral is of the same thickness as everything else.
