Masters of Pen and Ink Art

December 11, 2009 6:07 AM

Masters of Pen and Ink: Franklin Booth, Joseph Clement Coll, Michael Kaluta, Roy Krenkel, Norman Lindsay, Howard Pyle, J. Allen St. John, and Bernie Wrightson.

More info:

Franklin Booth: Bio.

Joseph Clement Coll: Bio.

Michael Kaluta: Bio, Home Page.

Roy Krenkel: Bio, Paleoblog, Michael Kaluta's appreciation for Roy Krenkel.

Norman Lindsay: Bio.

J. Allen St. John: Bio, Bio and gallery. [previously]

Bernie Wrightson: Home page .

Another great Pen and Ink man: Heinrich Kley previously on Metafilter.

...and, five stories by three of the Fleagles (Frazetta, Krenkel, and Al Williamson).

Yeah, I know, some of these were done with a brush.

posted by marxchivist (17 comments total)

Yes, yes, excellent.
posted by OmieWise at 6:33 AM on December 11, 2009

I want to print out all those Franklin Booth works and use them as bookplates. This post is awesome.
posted by Pastabagel at 6:34 AM on December 11, 2009

Franklin Booth's work is spectacular. I was going to link to an example, but they're all terrific.
posted by digsrus at 7:02 AM on December 11, 2009

Pro tip: never go to sleep in a space ship when there's someone wielding a ray gun and a huge bulge.
posted by digsrus at 7:20 AM on December 11, 2009

Nice to see some Bernie Wrightson love here. I discovered Bernie's work when I was in high school and studied everything I could find of his. Just an amazing line.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:32 AM on December 11, 2009

thank you. this is excellent
posted by paradise at 7:32 AM on December 11, 2009

Great post, thanks!
posted by interrobang at 7:52 AM on December 11, 2009

Oops:

Howard Pyle: Bio.

I want to print out all those Franklin Booth works and use them as bookplates.

I want to print them as posters and paper my office and make mouse pads and coffee mugs, *drool, thunk*

I been wanting to do a Booth post and a Krenkel post but there never seemed to be enough online, then when Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog started "Black and White Week" I figured I could get everything in.

Nice to see some Bernie Wrightson love here.

Don't even get me started. I don't care much for his output recently, but when he was at the top of his game (about 1972-1978) he was the fucking best.

This just in: weird Frank Frazetta story.
posted by marxchivist at 7:57 AM on December 11, 2009

Great !
posted by nicolin at 8:57 AM on December 11, 2009

One of my favorite local (to the Northwest) artists is Elizabeth Smith, who also works in pen/ink - she specializes in trees (and has done tree portraits for some clients).
posted by dbmcd at 9:25 AM on December 11, 2009

That Frazetta story is very interesting. In an old interview Frazetta mentioned Coll and a Spanish illustrator (whose name I'll have to look up) as influences on his work.

My own favorite: Hal Foster. (That's two thirds of a single page, a week's work, in front of him in the second link.)
posted by CCBC at 12:21 PM on December 11, 2009

Frazetta mentioned Coll and a Spanish illustrator

Maybe Fortunino Matania (Italian)?
posted by marxchivist at 12:43 PM on December 11, 2009

Yes on Hal Foster. I neglected Alex Raymond also.
posted by marxchivist at 12:46 PM on December 11, 2009

No, not Matania. Just rifled through a few boxes but can't locate the zine with the interview. I'll find it though. I'm on a mission now! (look for the name next year sometime.)
posted by CCBC at 1:16 PM on December 11, 2009

Well...a somewhat arbitrary and capricious collection of artists, innit? But boy, that blog is amazing, what a collection...my only complaint is too much on a page.

If you're going to mention Wrightson & Kaluta, why not some love for Jeff Jones and Barry Windsor Smith, the other two members of The Studio? Jones, arguably the best painter of that group, has a great pen/brush & ink style, probably best shown in his (er, um, her) strip Idyl. And Smith, in an amazing burst of artistic growth during his run on the first Conan comics, went from doing pale Kirby imitations to create his own unique style, with a gorgeous calligraphic line.

One old pen & ink guy who doesn't get much attention these days is Harry Clarke (scroll down past the color paintings). His line work is like Beardsley on a bad acid trip.

This thread looks like the usual suspects, but if anyone's interested, I still have some super-high res Booth scans here.
posted by Bron at 6:52 PM on December 11, 2009

Well...a somewhat arbitrary and capricious collection of artists, innit?

You got a point, but there is some direct lineage in my mind, with Roy Krenkel being the vital nexus. The Studio artists, Williamson, likely Frazetta, were all turned on to Booth, Lindsay, Coll, Kley, and St. John by Krenkel. Krenkel's output of finished pieces wasn't really that high, but he was an important teacher, mentor and bridge between the classic old illustrator guys and the up and comers of the late '60's and early 1970's. A lot of that was carried into more recent times by the likes of Dave Stevens and Mark Schultz. I'm not sure who is working in that tradition today. If anyone is I'd like to know who. I was originally just going to do the blog's "Black and White Week" but then I started thinking..."Gotta get Coll in there, always wanted to do a Norman Lindsay post" and it just kind of got away from me.

I wanted to mention Jones and Smith, but wasn't finding pages with the majority of their ink work on them. Thanks for the Idyl link.

Thanks for the Booth scans, and yeah, Harry Clarke's another of the greats.

I can't seem to stay away from Metafilter today.
posted by marxchivist at 8:24 PM on December 11, 2009

I'm not sure who is working in that tradition today.

Yeah, me neither. Back in the day, having a good hand for pen & ink was practically a job requirement for a working commercial artist, the reproduction technology available demanded it. These days, you can get just about anything onto a page (or a screen). But if you expand the tradition a bit to include a looser, more multi-media approach, I think there are plenty of artists today working with pen & ink. I'm thinking especially of people in the Barron Storey vein, like Bill Sienkiewicz (I believe he studied with Storey).
posted by Bron at 8:02 AM on December 12, 2009