The Cats of Frank Frazetta

Fantasy art icon Frank Frazetta is best known for painting women: a controversial point of gender critique that has drawn both detractors, who deride Frazetta's hyper sexualization of the female body; and supporters, who perceive Frazetta's women as empowered actors in control of their own sexuality. It's a can of worms issue that has been discussed at length by far more qualified people than me. Personally, I come down somewhere in the middle, recognizing a level of agency and authority in his depictions that is frequently undercut by an exaggerated level of objectification (Frazetta didn't just paint badass warrior princesses, he also painted a good number of damsels). The continuing critique is culturally important--especially within the cagey world of SFF--but not one that I'm going to rehash at length here.

What interest me in this piece is Frazetta's depiction of nature, specifically his almost obsessive employment of large cats. Panthers, tigers, leopards, jaguars and lions abound throughout his work. The man painted cats almost as much as he painted women--often in tandem and presumably in pursuit of a sexually charged feline aesthetic.

I would argue that it's difficult to find a popular artist so tangentially fixated on cats. There are plenty of painters who have employed feline symbolism in their work, and there are even more popular artists who supply the world with the thousands of kitschy house cat paintings that make their way into mass production, but few painters have engaged the feline world so thematically.

Something worthy of note, is the general subordination of the cats in relation to the women they accompany. They are almost always depicted as hunting partners, familiars, pets, or thralls. It's an aspect of Frazetta's work that has gone understudied, and one that further illustrates the complicated power dynamics at play within his art.    

Fantasy Expressionism and the Art of Jeffrey Catherine Jones

Jeffrey Catherine Jones is arguably the most enigmatic fantasy artist of the twentieth century. Born into a strict military family, Jones would spend most of her life defining just who she was as both a person and a painter. Though it would be easy to focus exclusively on the gendered aspects of her work, Jones established a rich and original fantasy oeuvre challenged perhaps only by Frank Frazetta, who famously called Jones his greatest living contemporary.

Like Frazetta, Jones spanned the gap between pulp and high fantasy, first working on comics, illustrations and cartoons before moving onto more abstract personal works later on in her career. Jones' work might best be characterized as late-expressionism, though it maintains a consistent commitment to figure and form. Tonally, Jones reveled in earth tones, employing rich oranges, yellows, purples and creams. Again, much like Frazetta, Jones obsessively painted the female figure. Though unlike Frazetta, Jones' work presents a gentler vision of gender and sexuality. Her nudes stand out as some of the most arresting of the twentieth century.

Here are a few of the best paintings by Jeffrey Catherine Jones.