The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective
by John Grant and Elizabeth Humphrey with Pamela D. Scoville
pub: AAPPL: Artists And Photographers' Press Ltd.
192 page hardback
Price: £30.00 (UK), $45.00 US), $69.95 (CAN).

We were a little late receiving a copy of this book, coming out last Autumn, but the wait was well worth it. If you ever wanted to have an art gallery of SF and fantasy art awards winners in one book, then all you really need is this book.

It has over 56 well-known artists here, many of them showing more than one piece. I don't know what they've done to their paper stock, but using the Frank Frazetta pictures as an example and no disrespect to other publishers in the past 25 years, the colours have a more vibrant than gothic feel to them.

The ASFA Awards began in 1985 to celebrate the best of SF and fantasy art on an annual basis. In 1986, they were renamed the Chesley Awards in honour of astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell. Not, I hasten to add, cos he depicted SF but as a mark of respect to the excellence that other artists have strived to do with their own artwork.

Mind you, this reviewer does wonder what'll happen if ever there's an award scheme for astronomical artwork and what they'll name it. This book travels through the winners from 1985 to 2002, showing not only paintings and the odd black and white illustration, but also the sculptures as well.

What will also be of use amongst the biographical details is a list of websites for many of these artists as well as noting artbooks of their own work so you have a useful reference book as well Picking out favourite pieces of artwork from this book would be a hard challenge.

Many of the paintings shown have illustrated book covers that you probably already own. Seeing them without the cover script does show them in a different perspective and I suspect why so many of us both these books.

I suspect some of you, like me, will wonder at some of the selections though. Not because the art isn't any good, far from it, but why some artists came up as top for several years and some notable artists seem to be missing.

It's a shame really that details on how the Award winners were selected wasn't included with this book if for not other reason than to give some insight on the voting process. If that's the only thing I can be critical about regarding this book then there's not to much to worry about.

In many respects, this is a history of SF/fantasy art from the past 17 years and if the sales of this book warrant it, especially as AAPPL are offering a nice discount at the moment, I'd love to see an annual book featuring winners and runners-up as I think they would have a runaway success.

GF Willmetts
SF Crows Nest

The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective
John Grant, Elizabeth Humphrey, and Pamela D. Scoville
Artists and Photographers Press Ltd (AAPPL) hardcover £30

review by Tony Lee
The Zone

Since 1985, members of the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA) have voted each year to award the 'Chesleys' - named after space art pioneer Chesley Bonestell - to honour the best genre works in a dozen categories by painters, illustrators and sculptors, and these awards are presented annually at the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon). This volume, the first of its kind, collects over 300 illustrations by Chesley winners from around the world, and is an effective showcase for excellence in the fields of book and magazine illustrations, unpublished works, gaming and product related art, and outstanding artistic achievements. The book includes biographical notes on all the artists whose work is featured here, listings of all Chesley Award nominations 1985-2002, and a full index.

What's most impressive about this collection is the astounding diversity of styles and subjects, due in part because the Chesley Awards also recognise quality in terms of individual talents who have found their niche or popular artists with successful careers that span many decades, in addition to the imagination and brilliance of single pieces of art. So, we find comics and magazine artist Alex Schomburg honoured in 1987 for a lifetime of fantastic airbrushed pictures while, more recently, an Award of Distinction went to the estate of Chelsey Bonestell in 2000.

As the merits of artwork are largely subjective, here's a few of my favourites chosen - with some difficulty I might add - from the spectacular variety of work in this amazing retro book: James Gurney's spooky pirate is a cutlass-wielding skeleton, complete with a wooden leg! (p.27); Don Maitz' cover for C.J. Cherryh's Hugo-winning novel Cyteen (1989) imaginatively depicts a clone lab with symbolic imagery (p.36); Alan M. Clark's unpublished "Pain Doctors" evokes the darkest hospital-hell and made me shudder (p.93); Michael Dashow's Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche is marvellously absurd with a library-wrecking rhino studying philosophy! (p.122); Donato Giancola's superb Space Odyssey Revisited for a millennial issue of Playboy, is simply one of the best 2001-related illustrations I've ever seen.

Whatever your preference in genre visuals, this is like a Who's Who and a What Picture of the whole extraordinary field of SF and fantasy art.

The Alien Online
by Ariel

The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective ed. John Grant et. al.
A largely US-eye view of some of the best fantasy and science fiction artwork of almost the past 18 years or so

On: 10.12.2003

The Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA) is an American organisation that presents the annual Chelsey Awards - named in honour of the late Chesley Bonestell - for work undertaken in the previous year. This volume collects together the winning pieces, where they are still available to be reproduced, from 1985 - 2002, in a well-presented hardback format, with full-colour illustrations throughout.

And what a cornucopia of (American) fantasy and science fiction art it is. Just flicking through and alighting at random on a few of the images, we find work by some of the biggest names in the field: Alan M. Clark, Frank Frazetta, David B. Mattingly, James ("Dinotopia") Gurney, Michael Whelan, Brom, and Vincent di Fate to pick but a few of the well-established and acknowledged masters, alongside relative newcomers such as Kinuko Y. Craft, Jean Piere Targete, Dawn Wilson or Marc Fishman.

As you would expect, there's a vast array of styles and techniques on display, from the clean, elegant lines of Di Fate's soaring spacescapes, to the architecturally enticing richness of Gurney's jungle cities, to the eldritch, sylvan woodlands of Targete, and the almost cloyingly baroque, gorgeously romanticised mythological scenes that are more frequently appearing on the mythopoeic works of the likes of Ellen Datlow and Patricia McKillip.

If I was to pick a couple of my personal favourites from the volume, they would definitely include James Gurney's illustration for the Ace hardback edition of Tim Powers On Stranger Tides (p. 27), which just seems to sum the spirit of the novel up perfectly, Ian Miller's 'Crucible: Conquest of the Final Realm' (p.158), which is yet another example of his stunningly detailed, Kaos-soaked style, and Todd Lockwood's 'Cerberus' (p. 105); I'm a big fan of artwork that rewards the viewer for making the effort of a closer inspection; where the devil is truly in the detail and there's so much more to see than initially meets the eye.

Overall then, The Chesley Awards admirably succeeds in its stated mission to present a collection of some of the very best (American) fantasy art of the past 20 years or so. But you'll probably have noticed that I said (and on more than one occasion...) 'American' fantasy and science fiction art. You see, the Chesley Awards are peer-voted, so although anyone at all can nominate any artist's work to be shortlisted, only members of the ASFA are eligible to vote on the shortlisted works and thereby decide upon the eventual recipients. And I rather suspect that as the ASFA is a largely American-based organisation, and as peers will quite naturally tend to vote for their peers in preference to non-peers, the volume as a whole has a slightly disappointing, but rather predictable US-bias.

I say 'disappointing' - and this is purely on a personal level - because, aside from a few token British artists, such Alan Lee, Anne Sudworth, Ian Miller or Brian Froud - who have worked on American publishing and / or film projects, or internationally-recognisable brands such as (in Lee's case) The Lord of the Rings - the vast majority of the recipients, and indeed the shortlisted nominees, are decidedly American, or at least US-based.

Okay, Jim Burns has been nominated a few times, but so far he hasn't been selected for an award in preference to his US-based counterparts. And there are some fairly glaring omissions; there's not even a mention in the nominees list (unless I missed 'em completely) for the likes of Les Edwards, Steve Stone, Josh Kirby, Dave McKean... but then maybe the UK availability of this volume will encourage more UK fans to become involved in the nomination process (I'm preparing my personal shortlist to email over to the ASFA as we speak), and maybe in future years we'll see a slightly less parochial US-bias.

Why is this a problem in the first place? A mainly US-based organisation acknowledging mainly US-based members; what's wrong with that? Well... nothing, I supopose; sour grapes on my part. I'd just like to see some peer acknowledgement for all those immensely talented British artists who go on producing amazing work year after year, with just a shot at the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist to realistically look forward to...

So anyway, my own attack of Anglo-umbrage should not, in any way, discourage the fantasy art fan from acquiring this superb volume for their collection. Alongside Dick Jude's volumes of Fantasy Art Masters and other recently published catalogues, such as The Frank Collection, this book provides an excellent starting point for the fantasy art fan to use as a road-map towards further and deeper appreciation of the individual artists' work. Many of the biographies in the back mention collections of particular artist's best pieces, and there are a number of website addresses provided as well. Take a deep breath, plunge on in, and you never know where the massed imaginations of the Chesley Award winners might take you.

Publisher: AAPL (UK)
Date: September 2003
Price: £30.00
Format: Hb
ISBN: 1904332102

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