Artists I Like: Volpini

A bit of an unusual post this week because here's an artist I found on Bluesky and never heard of. The art was so fun and compelling I assumed they were a well known professional. But I can't seem to find much other than their Bluesky page and an ArtStation page.

This stuff is great. It's got that impromptu cartooning style that reminds me of 60s and 70s cartoons. I can see this being animated for a 1978 special feature. Volpini's profile says they are a "character designer for animation" and it shows. Love it.

 

Artists I Like: Jordan Speer

I recently discovered artist Jordan Speer. I saw a random post on Bluesky and once I laid eyes on his work I just had to order a copy of his book Umbra.

It is a jaw-dropping work of art, and I have a new favorite artist.

Speer lives in Louisville, Kentucky. I lived in there when I was a kid, roughly between the ages of 2 and 8. I went to school at Lowell Elementary... which no longer exists. In fact my entire old neighborhood is gone because the airport took it decades ago. I still remember my first Halloween memories on those streets.

Much much later I moved back to the city with my new wife and we lived there in our early 20s.

So it is very nice to see a great great artist so close to home whose style is so perfectly suited to my taste!

Whimsical, colorful, bold, cartoony, and FUN. This is the good stuff. So go check him out. And pick up Umbra... holy hell it's affordable and lovely. It's a huge picture book telling a story without words. Very nice.

 

Artists I Like: J. Freels

Another artist I like is Jeff Freels, or J. Freels. I know very little about this creator other than he created Bean! the d2 RPG and he is visually impaired.

Bean is a great little game. The central idea is it's a world of anthropomorphic beans and you use actual beans as dice. See, you get a sack of beans and paint one side of some number of them. When you roll the painted side, it is a 1 and when you roll the unpainted side it is a 0. Or something close to that. It's a coin toss. But unlike lame single coin toss systems (50/50 for everything? Boring.), this is a pool system. More beans = more chances for higher scores.

But that's a digression and unrelated to the meat of the post: the art.

Freels is an artist after my own heart. A great cartoonist! His bean characters are swanky and cool, simple and direct. And I love them.

There isn't a lot to be found about Jeff Freels outside his own website. But he has a nice bio page that explains quite a bit about who he is, what he does, and so forth. I don't care about the Reiki Master stuff, I just like the wonderful cartoon art.

Artists I Like: Eric Powell

This week, I'm talking about Eric Powell. But I don't have a lot to say, honestly.

This is an artist I really only know from seeing copies of The Goon on the shelf back in the early 2000s... but never picking them up. I loved his vibe, but back then I just wasn't buying comics. Too bad too because The Goon looks fantastic... and I STILL haven't read it. Full confession.

But Powell hits this list because I love the look of his art and he seems like a swell guy. His visual style reminds me heavily of Frank Frazetta, of course. I'm sure that's no accident. And, to be honest, I tend to think all artists in this vein remind me of Frazetta. Probably a problem with my own myopic view and understanding of the comics and fantasy art world.

I'm going to seek out more Powell stuff. I picked up his Buzzard mini series at a small comic con last year and it's great.

Meeting Your Heroes

File this one under "yet another blog post about separating the artist from the art or something". Just a wee rant/random thought. Skip if you don't give a shit about that stuff.

"Never meet your heroes" is an adage filled with dread and tension. We all have folks who we idolize in some way or another to lesser or greater degrees. If you love movies by Hitchcock, then you are a Hitchcock fan even if you don't like being saddled with that term. And yet Hitchcock wasn't a perfect man (I actually don't know much about him, so maybe he was terrible... I don't know, it's not the point).

In my youth I was influenced by a lot of artists and I still fondly remember their work. I do a Sunday blog post each week called Artists I Like and I highlight someone whose work inspires me. If I know an artist is a piece of shit or has some seriously controversial opinion, I might choose to avoid talking about them for that reason. I have no interest in expanding the lore of an asshole. But also, I have almost no interest in defending an asshole whose only connection to me is they drew a picture I love.

Anyway... I had Armando Gil on my list. Gil was a comics artist for Marvel, DC, etc. I know him pretty much only from the Savage Sword of Conan pinups he drew, which were incredible. So different from other artists' work, so rich and vibrant

I was working up a post about Gil so I looked him up to get a general idea about him. Turns out he was convicted of multiple counts of rape in 2017 and is now in prison.

The fact that I loved his Conan art and that it influenced me as a teen cannot ever be changed. And I'll never say I DON'T love his work. But it is also my choice to promote or not promote someone based on my own feelings about them. I have no desire to promote a convicted rapist, so I won't be including this guy in my Sunday post series.

Normally this is because I don't want to contribute to someone like this financially or socially. In this case I don't think there's much benefit to Gil for anyone talking about him. That ship has sailed. He's never going to be back in the saddle. But aside from that, I have my own principles and endorsing someone like that is not on my list of things to do.

There have been a few other artists who were slated to be on the Sunday list who I removed for similar reasons. Not quite as extreme as this one, but uncomfortable enough that I didn't want to talk about them. Also, I probably already talked about someone who you think was or is a bastard. I didn't do extensive research on all of them. And I don't care about trivial infractions. So what if this or that artist once told someone to fuck off at a convention. Even a dickhead can be good at drawing.

It's my choice. I know that some people are of the opinion that none of this matters and that you should talk about whatever artist you want to talk about, regardless of their deeds. I agree. And I don't want to talk about this one anymore.

The Artists I Like series is about expressing my admiration for work that inspires me. I'm sure 99% of the artists I talk about are wonderful people. Some of them might be assholes. I can live with a few assholes slipping through the gate. And, to be totally transparent, if I post one and later find out something about them that I can't tolerate, I'll just remove that post. That is me doing what I want, on my own.

Artists I Like: Kelley Jones

Like many, I encountered the work of Kelley Jones for the first time in the pages of Sandman. I was blown away by Jones' use of blacks, often lavishly applying black where other artists might pull back lest they be accused of 'faking it' by doing black fills instead of drawing.

But with him you don't get the impression the blacks are arbitrary or accidental. You get the sense they are natural emergences from the drawing process, the gloom and darkness of each piece oozing from the pen. Clearly this is an artist inspired by other greats such as Frazetta and Wrightson.

I know absolutely nothing about Kelley Jones other than he drew a lot of Batman and did quite a bit of Sandman. I don't own a lot of Batman comics... maybe just half a dozen plus The Cult TBP. So I don't have any Jones work outside of Sandman and a few other oddities lying around.

I find his drawings inspirational. They are visual treats. In my own work I often struggle to find the "vibe" that I love. Artists like Jones help me at least get a sense of what that vibe might feel like.

 

Artists I Like: Les Toil

Brian Clarke, aka Les Toil, is a Californian artist I first encountered in the early days of my internet life, c. 2000 or something. I don't know for sure.

What drew me to his work was that he was drawing Toil Girls... big beautiful women. Like for real, really wonderful, beautiful, actual women. He used to (still does?) take commissions from real models to do their Toil Girls portraits. And man, they are grand.

He's also got a boat load of Big Daddy Roth type of vibes going on that I admire, even though, in those days, I didn't know who Roth was. I didn't grow up in that culture and any vibes I got from it were secondary.

This is the portion of the post where someone might discuss Toil's influences. But I have recently realized I suck at doing that. It happened when I heard someone say that "Magenta Mountain" by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard sounded a lot like the Flaming Lips. As soon as they said it, I heard it. But if they hadn't said it I never would have thought of that. Even though it kind of feels obvious.

I'm the same with a lot of visual art. Of course Toil has influences, one of them being the late great Duane Bryers. But who else influenced Toil? Is he into fantasy artists like Boris Vallejo? Does he love some Robert Williams? I bet he likes some Coop. I'm not sure. I could probably research it and find out. Or just go to Facebook and ask him directly. But I'm pretty shy and I likely won't do that.

Anyway... let's wrap this up. Go check out some Les Toil art, even the fun animal stuff if you're not into the lovely ladies.