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EUROPE'S MOST VISITED SF/F WEB SITE |
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Todd Lockwood: Wizard Of The Brush
Wizards of the Coast's most talented fantasy artist is interviewed.
His canvases can literally take your breath away. Typically large
and imposing, beautifully composed and superbly painted, they bring
to vivid life all the classic tropes of heroic fantasy ...
PB: I guess to most people you're seen as the artist who does all that fabulous heroic-fantasy stuff for Wizards of the Coast, and they don't immediately think of your work outside that arena. Do you ever regret this close association? TL: Not at all. I spent close to fifteen years in advertising, painting beer cans and satellite dishes. Towards the end of that stint I was close to losing it. I was looking around for another line of work entirely - real estate, design, bank robbery - anything to get away from yet another flying tea-can or dancing pill-bottle.
The whole time I was trying to get my (ex-)agents in New York (who shall go nameless) to get me some book work. They didn't want to be bothered with a market they didn't see as lucrative. I was stuck in the wrong market, doing the wrong work. Meanwhile, I was playing Dungeons & Dragons with friends every month or weekend, which was pretty much the focus of my real creative energies. It kept me sane. My agents did manage to get me a couple of gigs with Asimov's, however, that reawakened my interest. Terry Czezcko was the art director there at the time, and she suggested that I hang some work at a con and see what happened. I confess I had no idea that there was even such a thing as a convention. I started the networking which led me to TSR (who were the Dungeons & Dragons people before Wizards bought them in 1997). When the opportunity came along to work for them, I leapt at it. It turned out to be a tiny window that closed very quickly behind me. There was a time when it looked like it might be closing on me, but it has worked out extremely well. I love my work. Wizards is a great company. I am building a body of work, staying busy, making fans, and meeting a lot of the artists that I have admired for years. It has rejuvenated my career and my passion for art. PB: Where did your interest in fantasy art come from? Was it an obsession since childhood, or did it come later in life? TL: I grew up on science fiction and fantasy. I always preferred to read sf over fantasy, but I read a lot of fantasy as a child, too. Tolkien and Howard. Burroughs. Lovecraft. I loved Harryhausen's fantasy adventure movies: the Sinbad movies, Jason and the Argonauts.
Dungeons & Dragons introduced me to a broader spectrum of fantasy literature than I might have pursued on my own, but the roots of the passion were in my childhood. My dad and I used to go to all the "weird" movies, as he calls them. Friday night was the "Creature Features" on the local channel. My drawings were always full of space monsters and dragons. PB: What sort of formal training did you have, and how much of an influence does it still have on you? TL: I went to a design school. We had one quarter of Illustration, though we covered a lot of the basics early on, like colour theory and perspective, anatomy and such. But the real nuts and bolts (brush and thinner?) of paint on board I had to learn the hard way. I was my own teacher, which means that my teacher had no idea what he was doing most of the time. I have learned more in the last few years since I started going to conventions than I learned in the previous fifteen. And TSR has been a wonderful teacher. I also have to particularly thank Kevin Murphy and Joe DeVito for valuable, honest critique when I needed it. Too many artists, when asked, will just say, "Oh I like it. It's nice." Joe and Kevin were honest and pulled no punches. I try to give critique to those who ask me with the same honesty, because it meant so much to me. Early on, Kevin also arranged a convention painting demo around my schedule, which was generous beyond measure. I learned a lot from that.
PB: What are your preferred media? TL: I love oil paints. I painted in airbrush in the very beginning, because that was what all the advertisers wanted in those days. Yes, that dates me . . . I hated airbrushes. Little by little, I managed to convert to acrylics, which were better. At least I wasn't breathing the paint any more. But oils are the right medium for me. They suit my habits best, and have the richest, warmest quality. I have grown so much faster since switching to oils. I have seen other artists paint in acrylics so well that you could not tell that they weren't oils; Stephen Youll does it, the b*****d. But I never could. I am also very fond of pencils. Graphite is the medium we all grew up with. It comes most naturally to me, but there isn't much demand for it. PB: At World Fantasycon in Providence RI last year you displayed a piece of your black-and-white work - the first of it I'd seen. It was a genuinely lovely piece. Are you ever tempted to shift your concentration more towards b/w work? TL: I was thrilled that I was actually asked to do a cover in black-and-white. It is an under-appreciated medium. The art director had seen some of my black-and-white work in Spectrum, which speaks volumes for the importance of that kind of publication. They might not have even considered black-and-white otherwise. I have some other pieces for myself in the back of my head that started out wanting to be black-and-white, in the vein of other work I have done. I'd been considering tackling them in colour, just because of the general bias towards colour. But time will tell. There's a nice story that goes with the piece you saw at World Fantasycon. I don't know if I should tell it or not, though. It might be felt to be an invasion of someone's privacy. If you ever run into me at a con, ask me about it . . . I love telling it . . .
PB: What first drew you to Wizards of the Coast? TL: My job went to Wizards! I decided to follow it there. I was working for TSR when the money troubles hit, and Wizards bailed them out. Saved them, really. what drew me to TSR was the chance to paint things that people would want to hang on their walls. No one I know has beer cans hanging on their walls . . . PB: Your position with Wizards of the Coast obviously involves you in a fair amount of administrative work. Do you find that this, in terms of either creative energies or just sheer expenditure of time, inhibits your art at all? TL: It can be frustrating. I never spent so much time when I was freelancing keeping track of minutes or attending meetings. But a lot of it actually enhances the creative process, too. I have a good rapport with the art directors and designers here. There is a lot of give and take, and the opportunity to influence choices in a positive way. The lines of communication are open, and that makes a lot of difference. PB: I know that around the time of the Hasbro takeover of Wizards of the Coast last year you were optimistic that there would be no serious repercussions of the new regime. Has that optimism been borne out by events? Yes, I know, this is your excuse to be Company Todd! TL: Easy to be Company Todd, though: it has been business as usual since the takeover. No changes. Lots of benefits, too. I am required to take a "Corporate Ethics" class in the next few days, though. I'll need to review this interview before you publish it to make sure I haven't committed any corporate faux pas! PB: When you're reading fantasy for your own enjoyment, is it in the same heroic style as so many of your paintings? TL: That depends on the author, but I don't think I've read any such for a long time. I don't get to read nearly as often as I would like any more, and again, I read more sf than fantasy. But I really enjoyed Robin Hobb's Assassin series, and Greg Keyes's Waterborn books simply knocked me out - the best fantasy I have read since Tolkien. Very fresh and inventive. Plenty of action, too, so the answer to your question might be "yes". I like Greg Bear and David Brin quite a bit. I loved The Postman, and thought it should be an exquisite movie, if it was done right. It wasn't of course, but that might be a judgement based on how much I liked the book. I miss Asimov; the Foundation trilogy (shameful admission: I haven't read the other books in the series yet . . .). My favorite sf novel of all time is The Mote in God's Eye, by Niven and Pournelle. What the plight of the moties says about our own future in this universe is disturbing. I personally question whether we will ever develop the means and the will to travel even to the outer planets, let alone the rest of the Galaxy. If we don't, we are in for a series of cycles of our own . . . Had a few already, when you get right down to it. Tolkien again, of course, Howard, Lovecraft, Poe. Arthur C. Clarke -- Childhood's End and 2001 were two of the books that made the biggest impact on me when I was younger. Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. Can you tell that I haven't been reading as much lately? Shameful. PB: If you were told you could illustrate exactly one book in the whole wide world, which book would that be? TL: You are an evil, evil man. How can I answer a question like that? Perhaps "The Art of Todd Lockwood" (wait a minute I am illustrating that one). The Lord of the Rings has been done and done and done, but that would be a lot of fun. It is so full of classic imagery, and you could expand into The Silmarillion and beyond. It would be a nigh-on inexhaustible source. I have only ever seen a couple of worthy Balrogs. But I would have to really work hard to measure up to a lot of the art that has come before. I doubt I could ever match Ted Naismith's landscapes, or Alan Lee's vision. I was writing a novel once, and thought I would illustrate that, too. But now I have violated the terms of the question, haven't I?
PB: And the inevitable final question: Where does Todd Lockwood plan to go - or dream of going - from here? Are there any exciting now developments on the horizon? TL: For now, I love what I'm doing. But I intend to keep going to conventions, and freelancing. I have a kids' book that has been on a back shelf ever since I reviewed my contract with my (ex-) New York agents and noted that they would be entitled to 30% of anything that came of it. I have some personal pieces I would like to do, including a few more in the Hell Friezes series, of which there is currently only one illo (Cerberus). (From kids' book to Hell Friezes . . . what am I, schizophrenic?) As for the future? I don't know for certain. It's sort of a blank canvas. There's not much more on it than a sketch, anyway, which may be the Sagittarius in my rising sign, eh? Shooting the arrow not to hit something, but to go see where it lands . . . PB: Thanks once again for agreeing to be subjected to this interrogation. Next time I see you (Chicon?) I'll make sure to splurge the entire Paper Tiger expense account on buying you a drink. TL: Accepted! Editor's Note: Incidentally, all five of these illustrations have won the Chesley Award for Todd and are reproduced from The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective by John Grant, Elizabeth Humphrey and Pamela D. Scoville (published by AAPPL, September 2003 - more details from www.aappl.com). A version of this article originally appeared in The Snarl, Paper Tiger's reader zine. Many thanks to Snarl's Editor extraordinaire, Paul Barnett (www.papertiger.co.uk), for letting us play with his prose.
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OTHER CONTENT - September 2003
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...
But there is another aspect of Todd's art that is only just beginning
to emerge into the public view, and is every bit as exhilarating.
We were lucky enough to catch him between deadlines, and he spoke
to us from his studio at Wizards of the Coast.
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