2001 Anniversary Cover and original art

Ron Walotsky: We hang out. We have a good time.  

Crescent Blues: You talk about painting? 

Ron Walotsky: We talk about painting some, what we're doing, who we're working with. We look at the paintings. We'll ask people how they do something sometimes. Not very often anymore, but I used to. And people are very open. I've had people tell me who they work for, and maybe you should see them, and I've told the same thing to other people.  

It's a good group of people and they're very close, although we never get to see each other except at a science fiction or fantasy convention. I live in the same state with Don Maitz, and we had to come to Rhode Island to see each other. Or a convention somewhere in the world. 

Crescent Blues: It's like a traveling group of friends who reassemble at different locations.  

Ron Walotsky: And [World Fantasy Con 1999 was] like a reunion to me. There were people I haven't seen in years there. 

Mayan Myth

Crescent Blues: How long have you been coming to conventions? 

Ron Walotsky: Since 1980, I think, I did my first convention, but that was almost thirteen years after I was in the business. So I had no idea there were conventions. 

Crescent Blues: How did you find out about them? 

Ron Walotsky: Ed Ferman told me. He said there were two conventions, a world science fiction convention and a world fantasy convention. And about five years later, I said, well, let me go to one of these. It's what I do; let me see what it's like.  

I had no idea. I didn't have friends in the field. I never went to a science fiction convention as a fan, so I had no idea what there were like. I basically was doing fantasy and science fiction art to pay for my fine arts, so I could do that, although it's sort of reversed itself now. This is my career and I still do gallery shows, but it's almost secondary to some extent.  

And I went to a World Science Fiction Convention in Boston in 1980 -- I think that's when it was. I went there and did not know anybody. But people started coming over to me when they saw my nametag, and they'd give me some books to sign. Then somebody came in with this big cardboard box, and there were forty books of mine in this box. And I looked at these people like they're nuts; I had no idea that people collected this stuff or were interested in the covers or were aware of who did the covers.  

Early on we never asked for the paintings back even from the publisher because we were just happy to get it published, and it was stuck in a drawer or a warehouse somewhere. There are early paintings that were lost, and I never know what happened to them, because I never asked about it. And some of the publishing houses went out of business. Early stuff I did for Lancer Books or Pyramid Books disappeared. I have no idea where those paintings went. 

Crescent Blues: Ever seen any of them turn up in strange places? 

Ron Walotsky: I've seen a couple of them turn up at the Illustration House in New York City. And actually they gave me back a couple of them, because they felt they didn't get them… I don't know how they got them. I don't know where they came from. So there are things floating out there.  

Night Shift

And I know a lot of other artists did the same because I used to see paintings behind the door at Berkley, paintings that used to get banged into all the time. [The paintings] were peeling and almost destroyed, because early on, after they published [a book cover], they didn't think there was anything else for it. Now, of course, there's a huge different market, between selling a painting, selling reprints, selling prints. You can make money four different ways other than just the book cover. You sell foreign rights. You get all the originals back now.  

Crescent Blues: So the business has changed quite a bit since you've been in it. 

Ron Walotsky: Oh yes. I mean it's gotten much tougher. I'm pre-Star Wars, so the field was much smaller. There were many more publishing companies. You could get work from a lot more places.  

Now everything is conglomerated. There're very few publishing companies. The computer has taken a huge chunk out of a lot of people's work. [Publishers] can get not-very-talented people to work on a computer, take some stock images, reshuffle them, put it together, and you can be a graphic designer. I'm not taking anything away from that, but to be a painter, in some ways, has changed a bit. And a lot of covers recently have become like graphic novels, so they've changed the look.  

With the conglomerates, it's not the love of the business the way it used to be. It's the bottom line. It's how much money are they making. So even the [midlist] authors are in trouble, because they're being let go if they don't reach a certain quota. And the artists - [And the publishers] can save money by doing things in house much cheaper than having the artist outside doing the covers. So the computer has changed the business dramatically. 

Crescent Blues: Scary thing, isn't it? 

Ron Walotsky: It's pretty scary, yes. It really is. What's taken over some of it is the card art that a lot of artists do now, for Magic ® or Dune ® or different ones. I've just been doing some cards for a card set called The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan. I did 14 cards recently for them. 

Crescent Blues: Is that fun to do? 

Untitled #1

Ron Walotsky: Yes, the cards are fun. They're like little paintings, and they go very quick. You're usually doing eight and a half by 11 or smaller for the cards, so they're like quick, tight sketches. So you have some kind of freedom. And you do them fairly quick because of the time sequence and the payment, so you're not going to spend a lot of time on them. I kind of enjoy them once in a while. The only problem is that the only cards that seem to have done well through the years are the Magic, the Gathering ® cards. 

Crescent Blues: Are the cards gaining you a slightly different fan base? 

Ron Walotsky: Well, I'll sign cards for people. That seems to have come and gone a little bit, and right now the predominant cards are the Magic ® cards, and I haven't done any Magic ® cards. That's probably the only company I haven't done cards for. It seems everything else I've done has gone bankrupt, half of them.  

But when those cards first came out, with the pay scale and what they were, a lot of the serious artists weren't doing them, so they gave them to other people who've made huge amounts of money on them. They've changed the whole process of payment on those cards in the last few years. At first, they didn't seem to be a viable avenue, and they actually have stuck around for a while.  

Crescent Blues: And now I go to art shows at fantasy conventions and see a painting with the card framed beside it to show this was the original painting for the card. 

Untitled #2

Ron Walotsky:Yes, that's an added area of fantasy and science fiction. It's not just the book covers or the magazine covers now; it's the card art. And there's digital stuff, but very few. Even in [the 1999 World Fantasy Con], I know Rick Berry was here, but I can't think of any other digital artists actually that were showing here. I'm sure there are a couple of other ones, but it's not as much as you might think.  

Crescent Blues: Have you experimented at all with digital art? 

Ron Walotsky: I don't work the computer at all, actually. What bothers me about it… I've seen some great images, and there's a couple of people that are very good at it. There are David Mattingly and Rick Berry and maybe one or two other people whose work I think is very good. But there's no original painting. And even an original painting that's flat (and there's no texture for an illustration) has a soul. With digital art, there is no original with it. There is no soul behind it, so there's something missing. I mean that a digital piece can be unbelievably beautiful and exquisite but there's still something missing. There's no physical presence. It's still a photographic image or an image that doesn't have the depth that a painting will have. 

Crescent Blues: I notice when I go to the art shows, no matter how hard the publisher tries to give a very detailed, accurate representation of the painting, there's always so much more you can gain by looking at the actual painting. Stuff you don't see in a photograph, however good. 

Ron Walotsky: Yes, it's the quality of the surface. And it's the personal touch of the artist. There's a personality in that painting, even if you can't see the brush strokes, that artist's soul is in that painting somewhere. And you don't get that with the digital stuff. There's a coldness. I don't care how pretty it is; there's a coldness to it. There's something you can't get other than doing the actual painting by hand, when the person is connected physically to the canvas or the board. And when you're working on it--it's like your fingerprint. Digitally, there's a certain style, but a painting just has something else, a quality that you can't get at this point in manufactured images. 

Click here to see more of Ron Walotsky's paintings and other work. 

Donna Andrews 

Donna Andrews is the author of Murder with Peacocks, which won the St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Award in May 1998. Her second book in the Meg and Michael series, Murder with Puffins, will be released this spring.