In my 12th grade humanities class I had to do a research project and presentation on an artist of my choosing. I started my project on Michael Whelan, the fantasy artist and illustrator who I’d discovered in Science Fiction Age magazine and was shortly thereafter told by my teacher that it wasn’t “real art” and I had to chose another artist for the project.
Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner have a different perspective. The same year I did that humanities project, the Fenners began producing the art annual Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, featuring exactly the kind of science fiction and fantasy art I loved, but was discouraged from studying. It wasn’t until years later that I finally discovered Spectrum, but when I did, I had a little day dream about slapping a copy on my humanities teacher’s desk and saying something quippy to make her rethink her attitude.
Pink Raygun: When I first saw Spectrum, I felt validated because the art I actually liked was “real art”. Have you experienced that perspective from others – that what you feature in Spectrum isn’t truly art?
Arnie Fenner: All the time. There was a Dutch book that just came out that talked about Spectrum in it’s introduction, but because they considered the work to be kitsch. They were trying to do something more highbrow, which of course gets us all worked up over the concept of kitsch and what is or isn’t art.
When you think about it, all art in one form or another is commercial in nature. Whether you’re doing it for a gallery, a patron or a book company. Someone is buying that art. So, these distinctions between fine art and illustration and fantasy – all art is fantasy and all religious art is fantasy in a way. We get frustrated sometimes that people aren’t able make the distinction that art is art. They want to categorize one thing as being more serious than another. You can look at all sorts of fine art, whether it’s Andy Warhol’s soup cans, and we’re not going to look and say it’s the same thing as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. But, it fulfills a function.
All art is fine art and all art is commercial art in many ways. As long as the artist is trying to have somebody pay for it, there’s no difference to our minds. So fantasy art as an offshoot is, in many ways, just a reflection of the need for mythic qualities in peoples’ lives. The same way as a lot of the heroic imagery that was commissioned by the Medicis and people like that.
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Cathy Fenner: I think that’s why people have such a strong reaction to the fantasy art – because it does touch something deep inside them.
AF: And it tells a story. Even if there are creatures in it and things like that, it’s a human story and you respond to it because you like it, not because somebody tells you to like it.
CF: Or why you should like it. They don’t have to explain it to you. It kind of tells its own story.
AF: But, you also shouldn’t have to hide the fact that you like this sort of stuff and people do.
PRG: What is the reception of Spectrum now as compared to when you first started publishing?
AF: In many ways it’s anticipated. When we started out, no one knew what to expect. Now people expect it every year. It’s not that they take it for granted or assume that there will be another one, but it creates a certain amount of anticipation for it. The press runs and circulation goes up each year. We try to make more people aware of it.
If anything, appreciation of this type of art is really expanding and I think Spectrum validates some people’s interest in it. We’ve presented it in such a way that you don’t have to hide it. You don’t have to be ashamed or embarrassed by it.
CF: We also try to have all of the disciplines represented – digital art, classic painting, photography, sculpture- the whole gamut. Some books are only digital or only paintings, but we try to have it open for everyone.
AF: One of the things that we’re encountering now is that there are some people who don’t like digital art. They don’t like the fact that there’s more and more of it out there. There are painters who are a little bit scared of the idea of all these digital artists coming around. But, if you can’t do art traditionally, if you can’t draw or paint and you don’t have a good color sense, then the computer is not going to do it for you.
Anybody who does really compelling digital art can also do it traditionally. I’ve seen a lot of traditional artists try to do the digital artwork and they haven’t been as successful in that medium. But, there are artists like John Foster and Justin Sweet who are so good in either traditional or digital art. And Stephan Martini�re – not only can he draw like there’s no tomorrow, but he’s doing things digitally that I’ve never seen in any other medium.
PRG: Do you see digital art eclipsing traditional art in this area in the future?
AF: No. Simply because you have a sort of personal relationship with an original work of art. You respond to it differently than you do a print. A print, as nicely as it’s done, is always a print, whereas a painting causes a different sort of emotional reaction. I think there will always be traditional artists, just like you always see these different sensibilities in folk art. It doesn’t matter what methods or materials are available, there’s always someone out there who finds something rusty and sees a nice shape or nice look and they kind of bend it and shape it and then you have a robot made out of a plow. It’s not necessarily what people use.
PRG: While there is a larger female readership in a lot of fantastic fiction, it seems that female artists are really under represented in fantastic art.
AF: Part of that has to do with the way a lot of the art is commissioned for different jobs, whether its a book or a comic or something. They’re largely using freelance talent and guys tend to have that sort of cowboy mentality of “yeah, I can go out there and make a good living doing this sort of stuff.” Whereas women are smarter and may think, “I can struggle along as a freelancer doing a piece of art here and there and having to present to new art directors every week, or I can get a corporate art job and not only will they pay extremely well, but they will pay benefits.” I think that’s part of it.
But, part of it too is that it’s only been the last twenty years that it hasn’t been quite the old boys’ club it used to be. If a woman has the talent, it doesn’t matter that she’s a woman and it used to be that way. I think those barriers are broken down.
One of the things that has gotten me worked up is going through all the different awards that are given out in science fiction every year, whether its a Hugo or World Fantasy or something like that. I think Diane Dillon of the Leo and Diane Dillon team is the only woman to ever win a Hugo for art. There are other women you can look at and ask “why not her?” But for some reason it just doesn’t register in people’s minds.
There are a couple of young women artists in Spectrum 14 who just blew us away. Shelly Wan is one and I think she’s only 25. There are a couple of other people who are straight out of school. They have a different approach, I think, to the subject. Its not that it doesn’t fit or work, but its different.
PRG: I noticed that you’re expanding more, getting outside the Spectrum books and doing more with individual artists.
AF: We’ve always done some different books. We’ve done the Frazetta book and the Jeff Jones book. With the John Foster and John Palencar book, that was a leap more into contemporary artists, like these artists have been around so long its time to do a retrospective. We’d love to be able to do more, but we’re always looking around.
PRG: Spectrum has a good “big box” bookstore presence which I don’t see a lot of the smaller publishers doing yet.
AF: We’ve got good distribution through Publishers Group West and even when there was that hiccup last year when their parent company went bankrupt, they’ve been really good at getting the books out there.
Part of it is an education process there, too, because there are a lot of artists of whom bookstores and publishers are not aware. Bantam published a series of Frank Frazetta books in the 1970s and up to 1985 and those were very successful, but there were no more Frazetta books after that. So, when we did the first Frazetta book (Icon: A Retrospective – 1998), they didn’t know who he was. One of the bookstore chains decided they would take a chance and the other passed on it entirely. Suddenly sales were going really well and it took off from there. Spectrum has opened the doors for a lot of other people in that it’s shown the chains that this type of book can be successful.
PRG: You’ve also been reissuing Spectrum books. Is the plan to reissue up to a certain point, or have the entire series back in print?
AF: The publisher, Tim Underwood, has talked about bringing everything back into print and having the entire back list available, but he’s doing it very slowly, one book a year and only in softcover. You have to be sensitive to the collectors who have held on to the original hard covers. You want to build a trust. You want your customer to feel like you’re watching out for them while they’re paying out their money for whatever you do.
We don’t want them to feel like we’re doing this because we want their money. We’re doing this because we love doing it. One of the biggest arguments that we had was whether we were doing this because no one else had done it or if we were doing it to cash in. We’ve never done anything just to cash in. We’ve only done things because we believe in them. We believe in the artists. We believe this type of art work truly is art. We wanted more people to be able to see that and form a bridge between the artists and people who like their work.
For more on Spectrum, including published books and submission information, please visit the official website.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
