Spotlight on the Arts "Michael Whelan - Sci Fi Artist"

All Things Connecticut - Feb 27, 2012

and

Nov 03, 2024

Sometimes I stumble across a sparkling little gem of content that not many fans have seen. In this case, Michael had an in-studio interview with Ed Wierzbicki for Spotlight on the Arts (Connecticut Public Television) that is well worth your time.

The video is 12 years old but provides an excellent view into different parts of the studio. The larger space is his oil studio where he primarily works on his gallery art. You can see LUMEN 9 behind him. His drafting table is in his illustration space where everything is close at hand. Lastly, we get a peek into his reading area where he works through manuscripts, making notes and sketches. ~ME

Transcript:

[Music]

EW: Somewhere past the ancient sentinels through particles of the Galactic Empire and beyond the vista at the End of Nature, there lies his world…and the universal question to each artistic challenge.

Backed by a sheer cliff wall, monumental statues line the shore like sentinels facing out to sea. The statues resemble the Egyptian god Horus with hawk-like faces and a shawl of feathers. They each kneel resting weight forward on front limbs, but each statue erodes more than the last as the line extends down the shore. Children stand on the nearest hawk monument. One holds as staff and stares out as a line of doves flies past. — SENTINELS (1988), Acrylic on Canvas - 22" x 33"

MRW: How do you distill 1,200 pages of battle scenes, characters, other worlds, fantasy landscapes, creatures, weather patterns into one image?

EW: Creator of over 350 book and magazine covers, illustrator and painter Michael Whelan is master of the sci-fi and fantasy domain, and he begins the creative process here translating it in all author's words into a visual world.

[Music]

MRW: Most of the time it's buried there and it requires a little bit of confluence of different ideas and themes to come together with an image that's going to represent the whole manuscript.

Sometimes it'll happen on the first read through. I'll finish the book and I'll have an image in my head of what the cover has to look like and it's like a message from heaven or something…that this must be the book cover.

That happened to me when I read Robert Heinlein's book Friday for example, and indeed when I did the painting and the book was published, Heinlein called me up and said, “That's her!”

A woman in a blue denim jumpsuit stands in front of a view of space as seen through a gold trimmed porthole. The central zipper of her outfit is drawn down to her waist exposing bare skin. Her short cropped, sandy blonde hair has a slight curl. Her eyes reflect vibrant blue set in a gaze directly forward. The silhouette of a planet can be seen in the round viewport behind her. A star emerges from behind the planet and flares above her right shoulder. A moon with bright crescent highlight hangs over her left shoulder. — FRIDAY (1982), Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 30" x 20"

EW: A child of the 1950s, Whelan was captivated at a young age by America's mission to reach the final frontier.

MRW: Well, I was born into it. My father worked in the aerospace industry. He was a company rep for Lockheed, so we often live near missile bases. And so I saw a lot of rocket launches. There's nothing like waking up at three in the morning and looking out your bedroom window and seeing a Titan 3C go up in the middle of the night.

EW: And soon sci-fi films and stories awakened his creative potential.

MRW: I'd see a science fiction movie when I was very young and come home and try to draw scenes from the movie. It just seemed to naturally progress from visual things to what I was reading. If I didn't have a movie to draw from then I had to make it all up from what I saw when I was reading the words. That was even more of a challenge and I enjoyed that even more

EW: The sci-fi paperback pretty much evolved from the popular pulp fiction of the 1930s and 40s and that picture on the cover…well, it always got you started. That sexy noir image of the femme fatale or woman in distress soon became a scantily clad female surrounded by heroic men in space suits. But gradually through the work of artists like Michael Whelan, sci-fi cover art grew much more sophisticated.

MRW: The cover I did for Foundation has these long vertical towers in them and they have a an odd shape. I made them look long and tall with a kind of mushroom shape on the top. They look like the photograph of the bomb over Nagasaki.

An elderly man bound in a wheel chair sits with eyes cast to the sky. The white satin blanket trimmed in gold and decorated with stars and planets covers his legs. Visibly beneath it, his feet are set awkwardly askew, not firmly on the ground. Beneath a white suit jacket with a raven pinned to the lapel, he wears a black mock turtleneck with diagonal stripes on the collar. He looks stately as his arms are crossed and he props a vibrant red book in his lap. Beyond the platform where he sits, the planet has been transformed into a mechanized, futuristic city as far as the eye can see. Rendered in purples and blues, surface entirely metal. Topped by saucers of various styles, towers extend to a sky rendered upward in a gradient from pink to peach. — HARI (1985), Acrylic on Canvas - 32" x 20"

MRW: So I do all my work up here on the second floor.

EW: Fast forward to the 21st century in Whelan's artistic journey has resulted in scores of industry achievements but the real reward is about earning the trust of legendary writers like Stephen King and Isaac Asimov.

MRW: There's a challenge and yet a sense of freedom and that’s where a subjective inner sense of a particular artist comes into play because you respond subjectively to what you're reading and try to come up with imagery that's in harmony with what the author is intending.

EW: Whether he goes face-to-face to model a gesture or messes with metaphor to frame his own life, Michael Whelan is allowed permission to completely escape at least long enough to shape a few hundred pages into an imaginary yet highly believable reality.

For Spotlight on the Arts, I'm Ed Wierzbicki.

[End transcript]

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