While the Vallejo painting is one of my favorites on so many levels, and it does what so few of his latter paintings do, it tells us something about the realities of the characters in the painting. Notice how exceptionally and with such truth her body is rendered? It looks like the body of a wild slavegirl, so it was obviously painted before bodybuilding was more important to Vallejo than narrative. Notice also how her feet reveal a certain "savagery?" Her toes are those of a woman who has obviously been barefoot a lot, this I know from my hardcore commitment to barefoot living. The dragon-thing the man is riding is gorgeously rendered. But let's look closer at where it falls short in comparison to the Frazetta painting with the same three dominant elements.

The biggest difference is in regards to time. The Vallejo painting, as believeable as the characters are, is obviously a portrait of a pose frozen in time, though a stiff moment of no narrative value. It reveals no past and no future, only a still and artificial now. It looks, in fact, like this man, his steed and slavegirl are posing for a Gorean paintier, while the Frazetta painting reveals a specific narrative moment frozen in time at the height of its suspense, and the painting evidences not only the tension of the moment, but asks many questions about what had happened before this moment as well as leaving us imagining what might happen next. Think about that for a moment, think about time, how an image can be static in time or how it can exist in the past, present and future in our minds. As storytellers and artist we don't want to miss an opportunity to tell our viewers a story, even if they are filling in the past and future themselves. Art has the ability to exist in the past, present and future all at once. Great narrative art can travel through its own time in the minds of the viewers.

Let's talk for a moment about the Frazetta painting. Beyond its conjuring the past, present and future, it delivers not only suspense but high drama. The painting literally draws us not only into the fantasy, but the moment. The male figure is exaggerated just enough to be fantastical. here we see quite literally John Workman's belief that comics (or in this case, fantasy art, etc.) should be reality only better. The horse itself is all-but breathing fire, it is so full of life and anger. The girl, crouched in hiding is also exaggerated as only Frazetta can exaggerate, but she is also sexy and hopeful. How do I mean hopeful? I, at least, can't help but know she's going to get away or somehow come out on top. In the Vallejo painting the characters are breathing, but they are breathing easily, the breath coming from the characters in the Frazetta painting is hot, angry, terrified, stifled, blowing.

Let's give us women a fair shake, having just looked at slavegirls above, let's look at heroic powerful wild women. Both artists cannot be dismissed as purely sexist male fantasies (though all their paintings smell of testosterone) as the figures of power can be male or female in their paintings. The same issues we have already discussed can be seen clearly addressed in the below paintings of women with big cats. They are strikingly similar in tone, color, action, composition and subject matter, but one takes you into worlds of fantasy; the other leaves you cold, an admirer of technique in the here and now. Before I go ahead and leave these two paintings (Boris Vallejo on top, Frank Frazetta on bottom), for you to see for yourself all we have learned, let's talk about posture. In the Vallejo painting the girl is in a stiff lifeless posed bodybuilding posture (which leads me pretty certain Vallejo is now simply painting portraits of bodybuilders rather than truly painting fantasy paintings), while the girl in the Frazetta painting is crouched, tight as a spring, poised for action, her posture real and full of drama… in the past, present, and future. At this point the things we have learned should be evidencing themselves without my needing to say another word. Ask yourself, again, as you look at them… which one do you believe in? Furthermore, ask yourself which of the women looks like a strong woman who has lived her life in the wilds with giant cats, and which looks like a painting of a bodybuilder…?