Jongar Fights Back

While the golden age of illustration - about 1900 to about 1930 - was past when Frank Frazetta was born, Frazetta was the first Rock Star artist (if you don't count Maxfield parrish, and there wasn't any rock and roll in his day, so there).
His paintings are the closest thing to rock and roll you can get with a picture. The simplicity and single-mindedness of the subject matter, and the economy of technique ... the un-self consciousness of the artist, the way the work appeals to the visceral in the viewer, but doesn't leave us with anything intellectually. Sorry, rock and roll.

Without any preamble, I'd just like to say... "Will you look at those hooters?!?".

Seriously, there almost isn't any other reason for this painting to exist. When his wife saw this, she couldn't have been happy.

Okay, okay. This is art criticism.

Look at the alluring way the light fades as it travels down her leg, then from her ass (the actual highlight of the action) to her boobs. The monster is just a support for her lively figure, and Mr. Jongar is just a sketched-in foil to help you tell your Mom that this poster isn't just about the lady with the pendulous "jongars".

Besides Frazetta's impressionistic color handling - look at the oranges, reds, purples, etc in what any other artist would paint the green skin of the monster as GREEN - one aspect of his technique jumps out of every single painting is his adherence to realistic lighting.

And the base layer of lighting is flat shadows which, in frazetta's neo-technique of pen and ink, he learned during the golden age of comics, as a contemporary of the masters of interpreting lighting in pen and ink, Wally Wood, Will Eisner and others. Look at every single comic book on the racks today, and you will be very, very hard pressed to find any one of them in which lighting is realistically rendered, much less in black and white, much, much less with a careful technique like that used by one of the greats like Prince Valliants' Hal Foster.

Frazetta has created lively and believable shadow areas under Jongar's rib cage, behind. his bow-holding hand, under his jaw, and falling off of the shoulders of the "babe" and onto the mosters back.

These shadows, which lack any detail whatsoever but are still far from "dead", are not only the hallmark of Frazetta's fascinating technique, they are a primary tool in the efficiency of his technique, and one aspect that makes him a professional illustrator and not a fine artist. 

Like the Rock Star Barbarian Snow Sled guy painting, 90% of this painting is just sketched in. It's like Frazetta had a formula on a post it note on his easel: 5% finished detail, 30% semi-finished, 65% sketched in. The rocks, the non-existant detail of the monster's front foot - what is that? A claw? A pliers? I've never figured it out.

The shadows cascade down from the tip of the bow to the shadow under the bottom most rock like a rhythmic clash of base and drum. The shapes and colors are again like rhythmic cadences underneath the shadows. And the whole thing is piled up (like a turd? Like a coiled, organic, whipping being?) in Frazetta's traditional and easily understood "power triangle" composition.

Hey... where did his arrow disappear to under Jongar's chin?