Hannes Bok, pseudonym for Wayne Francis Woodard, was an American artist and illustrator, as well as an amateur astrologer and writer of fantasy fiction and poetry. He painted nearly 150 covers for various science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction magazines, as well as contributing hundreds of black and white interior illustrations. Bok's work graced the pages of calendars and early fanzines, as well as dust jackets from specialty book publishers like Arkham House, Llewellyn, Shasta Publishers, and Fantasy Press. His paintings achieved a luminous quality through the use of an arduous glazing process, which was learned from his mentor, Maxfield Parrish. Bok shared one of the inaugural 1953 Hugo Awards for science fiction achievement.
Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media as well.
Magic realism or magical realism is a style of literary fiction and art. It paints a realistic view of the world while also adding magical elements, often blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Magic realism often refers to literature in particular, with magical or supernatural phenomena presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting, commonly found in novels and dramatic performances. Despite including certain magic elements, it is generally considered to be a different genre from fantasy because magical realism uses a substantial amount of realistic detail and employs magical elements to make a point about reality, while fantasy stories are often separated from reality. Magical realism is often seen as an amalgamation of real and magical elements that produces a more inclusive writing form than either literary realism or fantasy.
Visionary art is art that purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness including spiritual or mystical themes, or is based in such experiences.
Since at least the 18th century, grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks. In art, performance, and literature, however, grotesque may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes an audience feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity.
The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism is a group of artists founded in Vienna in 1946. The group's name was coined in the 1950s by Johann Muskik, and the first exhibition was in 1959 at the Vienna Belvedere. This Austrian movement has similarities to Surrealism in its use of religious and esoteric symbolism and also the choice of a naturalistic style, countering the prevalence of abstract art movements at the time.
Ernst Fuchs was an Austrian painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, architect, stage designer, composer, poet, and one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. In 1972, he acquired the derelict Otto Wagner Villa in Hütteldorf, which he restored and transformed. The villa was inaugurated as the Ernst Fuchs Museum in 1988.
A visionary, defined broadly, is one who can envision the future. For some groups, this can involve the supernatural.
Michael Whelan is an American artist of imaginative realism. For more than 30 years, he worked as an illustrator, specializing in science fiction and fantasy cover art. Since the mid-1990s, he has pursued a fine art career, selling non-commissioned paintings through galleries in the United States and through his website.
Fairy painting is a genre of painting and illustration featuring fairies and fairy tale settings, often with extreme attention to detail. The genre is most closely associated with Victorian painting in the United Kingdom but has experienced a contemporary revival. Moreover, fairy painting was also seen as escapism for Victorians.
Richard M. Powers was an American science fiction and fantasy fiction illustrator. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2016.
Roy Stuart is an American photographer and film director who lives in Paris. His photographs blend glamour photography and contemporary art with an emphasis on female models and BDSM aesthetics. His photography books have been published by Taschen and has directed the movies Giulia and The Lost Door.
The Elephant Celebes is a 1921 painting by the German Dadaist and surrealist Max Ernst. It is among the most famous of Ernst's early surrealist works and "undoubtedly the first masterpiece of Surrealist painting in the de Chirico tradition." It combines the vivid dreamlike atmosphere of Surrealism with the collage aspects of Dada.
Surrealist cinema is a modernist approach to film theory, criticism, and production, with origins in Paris in the 1920s. The Surrealist movement used shocking, irrational, or absurd imagery and Freudian dream symbolism to challenge the traditional function of art to represent reality. Related to Dada cinema, Surrealist cinema is characterized by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and a frequent use of shocking imagery. Philippe Soupault and André Breton’s 1920 book collaboration Les Champs magnétiques is often considered to be the first Surrealist work, but it was only once Breton had completed his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 that ‘Surrealism drafted itself an official birth certificate.’
Oscar Mellor was an English surrealist artist and photographer. An associate of the Birmingham Surrealists in the 1940s, he founded the Fantasy Press after his move to Oxford in 1948, publishing works by university poets who emerged into prominence during the 1960s. Although best remembered for the latter, he saw himself primarily as an artist whose business activities existed to support his painting.
John Picacio is an American artist specializing in science fiction, fantasy and horror illustration.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, also spelled Arcimboldi, was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.
Object , lit. Object, known in English as Fur Breakfast or Breakfast in Fur, is a 1936 sculpture by the surrealist Méret Oppenheim, consisting of a fur-covered teacup, saucer and spoon.
The False Mirror (1928) is a surrealist oil painting by René Magritte that depicts a human eye framing a cloudy, blue sky. In the depiction of the eye in the painting, the clouds take the place normally occupied by the iris. The painting's original French title is Le faux miroir.
Gerrie J. Gutmann, also known as Gerrie Current, Gerrie von Pribosic, Gerrie Bollas (1921–1969) was an American post-surrealist painter from California. The imagery in her paintings was fantasy and often overlapped with autobiographical themes, expressing her struggles for an identity as a woman, an artist, and a mother.
