Ron Walotsky: an Appreciation

Cover art for the Paper Tiger compendium of Ron Walotsky's art. The 1996 acrylic was the cover for Epiphany of the Long Sun, the Science Fiction Book Club compendium of fiction by Gene Wolfe. (© Ron Walotsky, all images courtesy of Paper Tiger)

I suppose in a way we all three-quarters expected the news, but when it finally came it shattered many people in the fantasy art world and well outside it. Artist Ron Walotsky (1943-2002) died at about midnight on the night of July 29/30, aged only 58 or 59 -- no one seems to be quite sure. The art of the fantastic lost one of its finest modern practitioners; I and countless others lost a very dear friend.

Ron was born in Brooklyn and trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York, graduating in 1966. These circumstances made him both a lifelong lover of New York (even though he was forced by illness to live in Florida during his latter years, because New York was quite literally too cold for him, that love never waned) and a man who was very much a product of the 1960s. Ron often joked that the decade was little more than a blur in his memory, which proved that he'd enjoyed it the way it was meant to be enjoyed. His art, too, retained forever a sort of 1960s sensibility. Some of his earliest commissions were day-glo posters iconizing Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, and just glancing at then calls up visual memories of Oz, International Times and all the pneumatically lettered psychedelic album sleeves that filled the record stores of the day. Even in many of his final works, whether cover illustrations or fine art, there was still the lingering suspicion of psychedelia in the use of color, in the composition, in the delicious tendency to stray into surrealism, in the obsession with masks.

Surrealism was Ron's first love, but when he left art college, jostling wannabe neo-surrealist artists clogged the sidewalks of Manhattan. Ron was sensible enough to realize that trying to compete against this tidal wave would offer nothing more than a quick road to food stamps. He started to earn a living by doing commercial work. His big break came when he was commissioned by Ed Ferman to paint the cover for the May 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, illustrating a story by Phyllis Gotlieb called "Planetoid Idiot." Over the years he would paint well over fifty covers for that magazine, and during a certain period of the 1970s it was hard to distinguish, in one's mind's eye, between the ethos of F&SF's fiction and the Walotsky artistic vision, so much did his covers seem an integral part of the rest.

Valentine of Majipoor - 1999 cover and poster for the Science Fiction Book Club omnibus of Robert Silverberg (acrylic on board). (© Ron Walotsky)

The book of his work, Inner Visions, published in 2000, contains a small selection of his fine art. That it did not contain a larger selection was entirely due to an overzealous publishing executive who convinced herself that readers of the book would be too unsophisticated to appreciate such stuff. Even in this much-abbreviated assortment, however, it is possible to see the two main directions in which his unfettered visual imagination took him.

First there were the abstract and semi-abstract paintings, strongly flavored by surrealism and also, he claimed, much influenced by his interest in eastern religions. Many of these works fell into his long Children series, in which fairly realistic portrayals of children were cast into surrealistic surrounds, enhancing the surreality while at the same time often creating an odd, ineffable sense of invisible menace.

And second there were the painted horseshoe crab shell masks. These have to be seen to be fully understood. He started doing them when he was living on the beach in New York. As he wrote in Inner Visions:

The Hestwood - 1999 Cover for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, illustrating the story by Rob Chilson (acrylic on board). (© Ron Walotsky)

I have no idea how many of these shells Ron fastidiously painted as the masks of what he called the "Ancient Warriors from Lost Civilizations," but there must have been dozens, probably scores, possibly more even than that.

Each is different, not just because of the different shapes of the shells but because Ron saw in each shell an individual "personality" which he then developed so that the shell became a mask that conveyed the nature of the otherwise undefined person behind it. Any one of these masks on its own possesses an uncanniness -- a feeling of enormous swathes of unknown history going all the way back to primordial times -- that is impossible to appreciate from a photograph. Seen collectively, as he exhibited them in convention art shows and the like, the masks convey an enormous sense of presence, as if, should you look away for a moment, they might start slowly and silently bobbing, speaking wordlessly to each other.

For a year or more before his death, Ron and I had been talking rather lackadaisically about doing a book together, using perhaps fifty of the masks as both illustrations and a springboard for an accompanying novella which I would write. There were two reasons for the somewhat lethargic nature of our conversations on this. One was that we knew with certainty that any publisher would look at all the different, individualistic masks and immediately say: "But they're all the same."

The other was that we thought we had all the time in the world.

Which, of course, we didn't. What I am now hoping to do is assemble a dozen or so fellow writers, each to use one of Ron's horseshoe crab masks as the springboard for a story to which the mask would form a frontispiece. In that way, perhaps, we could find a publisher and thereby provide, aside from sorely needed funds for Ron's estate, a permanent record of this aspect of the creativity of a remarkably creative artist.

Koi Fish - Private Commission (acrylic on paper). (© Ron Walotsky)

I get the impression that all of us working in or associated with the fantasy art world somehow undervalued Ron's work while he was alive. In part this was due to his immense popularity and sociability -- it is hard to keep remembering that the guy propping up the bar next to you and sharing laughter (so, so much laughter) is actually a very specially gifted creative genius. This under-appreciation extended into the arena of the field's awards: Ron was nominated for Chesleys, Hugos and World Fantasy Awards, but not nearly as often as his work deserved. And he never won one, even though some of the relevant paintings remain forever ineradicably imprinted on the mind in a way that their successful rivals of the time often do not. Perhaps, now that this very dear friend of so many people has gone from us, we can come to our collective senses and do something to rectify the injustice.

Ron, we loved you. Farewell, ol' buddy.

Click here to read Donna Andrews interview with Ron Walotsky

Paul Barnett

Under the name of John Grant, Paul Barnett has won the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award and many other honors. This fall sees publication of his first novel in nearly a decade, The Far-Enough Window, and with artist Bob Eggleton, his "book-length fiction" Dragonhenge.