DiFate Smiles Kindly
01/10/2002 . Source: Paul Barnett  

It's hard not to use superlatives when talking about science fiction artist Vincent Di Fate. Just when you've been staggered by this artist's work, you realize he's also the man responsible for the ground-breaking survey of 20th-century SF art, Infinite Worlds. Paul Barnett from Paper Tiger interviews this fine fellow.

PS: You're obviously a man of many parts -- artist, writer, President of the Society of Illustrators, etc. Did you plan to branch out like this, or did it just sort of happen?

VDiF: A man of many parts, aye? Unfortunately, as I grow older fewer of those are still moving parts. Like many people in the freelance world, despite the fact that I've been very prolific in my career, I've always felt underutilized. I never took my writing very seriously, for instance, but I always wrote.

I always lectured, and in doing so, I discovered that I was something of a teacher. I also am fairly analytical in my thinking, and, although many artists probably are, most function intuitively and seldom have a need to access the language to describe what it is that they do.

My transformation from workaholic illustrator to writer, teacher, lecturer, administrator, etc., happened almost by accident. A wonderful illustrator named Dean Ellis, who during the 1960s and 1970s was prolific in the sf genre, had been following my Sketches column in Algol (or was it Starship?) and understood from my writing that I knew something about the history of illustration as it extended beyond the field of fantastic art.

Dean had been active on the Board of Directors at the Society of Illustrators since 1958, and when it came time to find a new Chair for the Permanent Collection Committee during Walter Horten's administration (about 1984 or so), Dean recommended me.

It grew from there, extending to the chairmanships of perhaps a half-dozen other committees and, finally, to the Presidency of the Society. For the sake of accuracy I should point out that I served two terms as President and am now a virtual civilian at the Society, although I'm still active as a member of the Permanent Collection Committee, am on the Hall of Fame Committee and am a lifetime member.

The credibility extended to me by my work with the collection (I managed a committee that oversaw the accessioning, restoration and care of a collection valued at somewhere in the neighborhood of six million dollars) allowed me to write Infinite Worlds and to expand my writing into other areas.

Nowadays I no longer feel underutilized. I'm busy all the time -- and I feel really alive!

PS: What first brought you into the field of science fiction art? And are there any artists, either historical or more contemporary, whose work you feel particularly influenced you in taking this decision?

VDiF: My first exposure to sf was at the age of four when I was taken to see the motion picture Rocketship X-M (1950). R X-M was the first movie of the 1950s genre cycle to go into release, although George Pal's Destination Moon had begun production nearly a year earlier.

From the very beginning of my reading in the genre I quickly realized the disparity between sf on the screen and sf on the printed page, but, having a strong visual orientation, I have remained an avid fan of both. Readers often complain of this disparity, but it's clear to me that books and movies are fundamentally different mediums, apart and beyond from what separates them at their cultural roots. At any rate ...

Not long after seeing Rocketship X-M, I was taken to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and saw Yves Tanguy's magnificent abstract painting The Multiplication of the Arcs, which, to me, is unequivocally an sf painting.

After that, exposure to Stanley Meltzoff's paperback cover for Heinlein's The Puppet Masters and some of the early paperback art of Robert Emil Schulz and I was hooked!

Fantastic images surface throughout the entire body of human art, from the pictographs of ancient Egypt to the works of Bosch, Rubens and thousands more. It has all influenced me, and continues to influence me. I'm convinced that this kind of imagery -- what Carl Jung would have called iconography -- somehow has special meaning for our species.

PS: What advice would you give to new artists thinking of entering the field? And what advice would you give to art colleges who find they have budding sf artists among their student body?

VDiF: Anyone interested in a career in illustration must first become aware that there are far easier ways to earn a living. We live in a time and in a culture where success is measured not by the uniqueness of our vision but by the amount of money we make.

The upper stratum of internationally known illustrators may make fabulous incomes for several years, but nothing taints artists, be they actors, writers, painters, etc., more than success. You become known for a particular type of thing and can often be pigeonholed.

You become connected to a time period and are thought of as dated. (The magnificently talented Richard Powers is a good example of someone who was "punished" for being successful during the 1950s and 1960s. By the time of sf's New Wave era in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he should have thrived, his work was being thought of as out of style. And in the mainstream of illustration, does anyone even remember Peter Max?)

I'd like to see art schools include courses in fantastic illustration because making art for this genre is largely unlike any other kind of picture-making. A few schools offer such courses (such as my course at the Fashion Institute of Technology), but most of the ten or twelve top art schools don't. They at least should be sensitive to the notion that additional skills are required by this genre.

While drawing, composition and painting techniques are critical to any good art education, fantastic art requires a fair amount of abstract reasoning and imagination. Not everyone is born with these skills, nor can everyone learn to master them. Those who have innate ability in these areas, however, should be nurtured and trained how to channel them.

PS: How much do you read science fiction outside of your professional requirement to do so?

VDiF: I only read four or five sf novels a year (usually the ones that make it onto the Nebula and Hugo ballots) beyond what I get to illustrate. Most of my reading these days is in the fields of science, art and philosophy. I don't know anyone who is reasonably successful who has time for much recreational reading.

PS: Infinite Worlds, your survey of science fiction art, has been hugely influential and widely acclaimed -- in particular, shortlisted for what would have been your second Hugo. Have you any plans for follow-ups in the related artistic fields of fantasy and horror?

VDiF: Nice of you to bring up Infinite Worlds and the Hugo. I'm flattered by your far too generous remarks. [Here an embarrassingly flattering remark of Vin's has been cut -- Ed.] Infinite Worlds, Hugo award or not, is performing beautifully and has established some viewpoints on which better and more scholarly works can and will be written. It was meant to point out the quality and importance of sf art, but it was, by intention, limited to being an affordable, pop-culture sort of thing -- the first baby step toward respectability, if you will.

There are two sequels planned, one on supernatural horror art, the other on fantasy art. They are daunting projects because of the sheer enormity of images and of literature devoted to both areas. One could argue, and reasonably limit, an sf book to the 20th century and, in the case of Infinite Worlds, to the USA, thus almost totally ignoring the wonderful work done elsewhere.

It would certainly be a good deal more difficult to make those same, somewhat arbitrary limits apply to horror and fantasy, since the roots lie clearly and far more extensively outside the USA.

It'll probably be a few more years before I tackle them, as I'm busy with other projects at the moment -- and a bit burned out by the exhausting effort of having worked on Infinite Worlds.

PS: And what of your other future plans?

VDiF: My immediate plans include continuation of my freelance illustration career, completion of a novel I started more than a year ago and have been far too busy to get back to, and the writing of several science-related books for children for Scholastic. These Scholastic books will be on seemingly offbeat topics, like quantum physics, ESP, UFOs and the like, with the principal aim of getting kids to think beyond the sensationalized information they encounter on tv.

PS: Have you any new artistic projects you're excited about?

VDiF: I have plans for several ambitious picture books, all of which will include a fair amount of supportive text. Among them is an elaborate picture book for adults on UFOs, and, although it may seem like I'm fixated on this subject, I do not believe that flying saucers are visiting us from other planets.

The science of UFO investigation, when done by real scientists, can be fascinating, and the most significant aspect to the whole UFO phenomenon is not in the physical sciences, but in the social sciences -- that the stresses in our culture should bring us to a point where four million people in the USA alone have come to believe that they have had alien abduction experiences.

Harking back to the tradition of the illustrator as reportage artist, I'm hoping that my UFO book, tentatively titled Visitors, will be a treat for the eye, as well as offering food for thought.

PS: What materials are you happiest working in, and how did you come to settle on these?

VDiF: If the truth be known, I'm not happy working with any kind of artists' materials. I'm one of those artists who finds the process of picture-making to be sheer torture. Each project is a brutalizing confrontation with my artistic inadequacies.

However, when I was in art school acrylics were new on the horizon and I became proficient in them. I find them totally inert, however, for unlike oils, for instance, which flow and blend, acrylics must be constantly manipulated in order to look like anything. I often add brush tracks and simulate blends to make them look like oils, but acrylics, in themselves, do not naturally yield these qualities.

One might ask, why not just paint in oils? The response is that, given the way I work, time simply doesn't allow for my working in oils which can sometimes take weeks to dry to the touch. I have produced a painting every three to five days for most of my career (and have produced a fair amount of overnight wonders, to be honest).

It's not that I'm such a genius, but rather that I have a terribly short attention span and would probably do away with myself if I had to spend any more time on a single painting. I envy anyone who can spend two weeks, two months or two years on a single work.

PS: What are your views on the use of the computer in creating artwork? Do you ever use it at all yourself?

VDiF: The computer's here to stay and will revolutionize illustration in the short haul. For one thing, many of the world's most famous early illustrators were excellent draftsman, but were not especially skilled in the other disciplines, such as composition, for instance. With the scanning of images on computer almost anyone can be a draftsman, in a manner of speaking.

This leveling of the playing field will put a greater emphasis on other picture-making skills, such as colour, rendering techniques, composition, etc. In time the revolution will cease to be about the new technology and will come to focus on how to make better pictures, regardless of medium. The challenge for anyone considering creating art on the computer is to not allow the medium to transform them, but rather to bend that medium to suit his or her personal vision.

And there's some history that suggests this. In the 1910s and 1920s, for instance, illustrators were alarmed that the airbrush would put an end to painterly picture-making. In nearly 80 years it hasn't. In the mid-1950s, at the end of illustration's mythic Golden Age, photography took over the advertising markets and began to dominate all but the fiction magazine markets. The result was that illustrators of that time turned to impressionistic and expressionistic techniques to offer an alternative to academic realism, which had clearly been supplanted by the photograph.

As for my own work, I just got my first computer in January and am still stumbling around in the dark. It'll be some time before I can produce art of any decent quality in this medium.

What I know about artists is that we feel the sky is always falling, that the past was always better (which it usually wasn't), and that the future always looks bleak.

PS: As President of the Society of Illustrators you must obviously have become au fait with the US art establishment in general. Have you any views on how that establishment could better communicate the arts to the US public?

VDiF: As a younger man I always altruistically believed that if artists worked together for their common good, conditions would improve. This idea would work wonderfully well if it weren't for human nature. Some artists have huge egos. Most artists are inner-directed and the notion of working collectively to achieve a goal is almost totally alien to them. What I now believe is this:

Artists' organizations can best serve the community of artists by promoting their art. The Society, for instance, was never intended to be an artists' rights organization. Its charter, its constitution and its tax-exempt status specifically forbids it from being so. But what it is is a privately owned and operated museum that is devoted to the art of illustration and open to the public.

A visit to the Society's galleries is worth more than all the words of all the politicians who ever gave the slightest thought to the visual arts. The best thing the Society can do is to transcend the differences of its members and of the vast community of illustrators that extends beyond it (its membership is less than 1% of the total number of working illustrators), and do all that it can to keep its doors open.

PS: The Society of Illustrators has a magnificent collection of art. Is there any one single painting in it you would particularly wish to be given for Christmas? And is there any you particularly wish you'd painted yourself?

VDiF: The collection is so terrific and extensive (somewhere in the neighborhood of 2500 works) that it's difficult to narrow my choice to just one painting, but I will mention two that currently hang in our Hall of Fame gallery. There's a great Dean Cornwell painting of a man in a rain slicker and hat carrying a woman up a rickety staircase and there's a wonderful Tom Lovell piece of a man and woman standing in a doorway.

The subjects of these paintings might not seem like much, but their execution is something to behold. And, no, our holdings of sf/fantasy art within the collection are not great. I avoided conspicuously beefing up that part of the collection during my tenure as Chair to avoid complaints of conflict of interest.

As to which of the works in the collection I wish I could have painted myself, I'd have to say: any one of the 2,497 works that I actually didn't do.

PS: Would you like me to buy you a drink by way of a thank you for your time and patience?

VDiF: Buying me a drink is entirely unnecessary, it was both an honour and great fun to have been interviewed.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Snarl, Paper Tiger’s reader zine. Many thanks to the Snarl’s Editor extraordinaire, Paul Barnett (www.papertiger.co.uk), for letting us recycle their prose.