Artist of the Month: Bernie Wrightson

It doesn't get any better than 'Frankenstein' by Bernie Wrightson. When your talking about ink line illustration as I usually am when I'm talking about 'image making', then this is the definitive work. You don't need to look any further. If you can find a decent copy on e-bay then its worth buying and studying because Wrightson is a brilliant draughtsman whose figurative work is second to none and this is without doubt his master piece. Its easily been the greatest influence on my own imagery, as you can see on my sister blog, JRC-1135. I learned more about image making from a handful of Bernie Wrightson's images than I did from three years at the Kent Institute of Art and Design.


There are several reasons why the pictures in this book are just so amazingly good. First of all there is the feel to them. Wrightson is one of those American 'superhero artists' who usually fall into the trap of monotony, churning out the same muscular figures day after day, but in this instance, Wrightson manages to pull himself up and beyond the stereotypical 'Marvelesque style' and prodces something (in my experince) unique. He does this in three ways: first he does away with the outline and instead works up textures using lines to dscribe tones. This is not all that unique, as old copperplate etchings were often done this way (look at the faces on paper money for example) but Wrightson manages to weld this old fashioned technique to his more modern 'comic book line' producing images which are a hybrid of both styles and yet resemble neither.


Then there is his composition, and here he really excels himself. Unusual compositional formats are two-a-penny in comic books, and thats essentially where Wrightson has learned his art, but here he goes one step further again by combining older styles (the sort of thing one might see in 18th century oils) with modern comic book styles to recreate the sense of an 18th century story seen with modern 'cinematic' vision. His use of silent space for example is sublime and far beyond anything I've seen in comparative works of illustration.

The irony of Wrightsons epic is, he did it all on his own volition. There was no commision, thus he had a free hand. Its too bad for me there isn't a market for high class illustration like this because then this style wouldn't be so obscure (and I'd make more money doing illustrations).

Bernie Wrightson at Wikipedia