FRAZETTA: KING OF PAINT Chapter 0: 1960
by Paul Vespignani
MAASAI WARRIOR(1)(1960)(oil painting)/MAASAI WARRIOR(2)(date unknown)(oil repainting)/MAASAI WARRIOR(2)(1996)(face repainting)
Frank's personal painting MAASAI WARRIOR was painted in 1960 when Frazetta was earning his daily bread in the thankless(and worthless) job of being the Sunday comic strip ghost artist for Al Capp. At 22 x 45 this was Frank's 2nd largest painting. His biggest painting ever was also a personal painting: LION HUNT(date unknown) which was a big 36 x 48 horizontal rectangle.
Lion Hunt (date unknown)
MW was painted on a stretched canvas. Frazetta has said that he enjoyed painting on stretched canvas and the few times he did so always resulted in an extra special painting(CONAN THE ADVENTURER(1966), MONSTER MANIA 2(1966), EERIE 23(1969)). However he and Ellie fretted over the inherent fragility of stretched canvas most particularly its potential to be accidentally punctured.
The intro of FRANK FRAZETTA: BOOK FIVE(1985) consisted of a pithy interview with Frank and Ellie conducted by the book's editor Betty Ballantine. It touches briefly on MW: ELLIE: He did that for me as an anniversary present. Then he sold it. BETTY: SOLD it?! Oh, no! FRANK: Come on, Betty, I can paint it again... This intriguing excerpt suggests 2 questions: 1) When did Frazetta sell MW? 2) When did he repaint it?
In 1996 Frank suffered multiple strokes that permanently affected his right hand/right arm. Frazetta had always been a right-handed artist and after the strokes he could still draw and paint with his right hand. However after the strokes his right hand/right arm was subject to unpredictable and uncontrollable shakes and tremors which would cause the brush, pen, or pencil he was holding in his right hand to inadvertently ruin any piece of art he was working on. His left hand/left arm was unaffected, but he was a right handed artist.
Maasai Warrior Preliminary Work
FF made the fateful decision to switch to painting and drawing with his left hand for the last 14 years of his life. This was certainly 1 of the great inspirational true stories of a celebrity overcoming a major medical setback triumphantly, right up there with Olivia Newton-John's very public battle and ultimate victory against breast cancer in the 1990s which gave her an additional 3 decades as a proactive thriver/survivor.
Even if you are a non-artist and have never suffered a stroke you can perform a simple experiment if you are a right handed person. Take a pen in your left hand and sign your name. Most likely that signature will look like it was signed by a very drunk person. Now imagine how much more eye/mind/hand coordination that is needed to do a piece of visual art(compared to a simple signature), especially at the very high level of artistic sophistication that Frank regularly achieved for decades as a right handed artist. The fact that Frazetta was able to do ANY art at all left-handed was truly amazing. If that left-handed art was sometimes more tentative and less accomplished than his right-handed art, that was totally understandable and easily forgivable under the circumstances.
According to Ellie, Frank's 1st attempt at left handed painting was repainting the face of the warrior in the MW repainting. She said he SCRAPED OFF the original face so there was literally no turning back with all of his artistic bridges burned behind him in regards to the warrior's face. He did the face repainting overnight while Ellie slept. When she saw the new face in the morning she was thrilled: "He improved the face 100%!" The repaintedface could be more accurately described as beautiful rather than merely handsome. Generally speaking Frazetta wasn't a fan of David Bowie style gender ambiguity. His male characters were very masculine and his female characters were overtly feminine. So the very feminine face for the MW repainting is a fascinating exception to his more traditional gender archetypes.
MAASAI WARRIOR (I) (1960)
I think both versions of MW are quite excellent and I can't really choose a favorite between the 2 of them. The 1960 original made its 1 and only art book appearance in LEGACY(1999) and is available as a print from Frazetta Girls. The MW repainting with the repainted face has never appeared in a FF art book, but it has been posted on the internet multiple times.
MAASAI WARRIOR(2)(date unknown)
Several times during the couple of years of on and off filming of the FRAZETTA: PAINTING WITH FIRE(2003/2004) documentary(these filming years being around the turn of the century) Frank complains that the MW repainting need some additional repainting, but Ellie refuses to give him access to the MW repainting and has instead framed it and added it to the core collection of the 3rd(and best) version of the Frazetta Art Museum. So SHE feels it is definitely finished and doesn't want FF to do any more painting on it and she has the only key to the museum. At 1 point in FPWF Frazetta openly grouses: "I don't even have the key to my own museum." Apart from their obviously differing opinions regarding the finished state of the MW repainting, it seems that Frank and Ellie pretty much agreed that the 100 or so masterworks in the FAM were in their definitive final states of execution/resolution and that repainting any of them would be risky and ill advised. As FF referred to the museum collection so pithily: "If they're hanging, they're hanging." He further elaborated: "I honestly can't think of any way I can make those paintings any better...and I mean that."
It seems highly likely that soon after the untimely death of Ellie in 2009 Frank had full access to the MW repainting and was able to repaint it to his heart's desire. This might be the reason why the MW repainting in its final state is such an unusually BEAUTIFUL painting by FF, with a strong emphasis on softness and smoothness. Softness and smoothness were the 2 primary stylistic traits of Frank's left handed paintings, whereas his earlier right handed paintings were somewhat rougher, a great deal bolder, and had extra texture.
SELF PORTRAIT(1961 or 1962)(oil painting)(copyright 1962)/SELF PORTRAIT(1995)(pencil illustration recreation)
Frank's self-told true-life origin story of his 1961 angry self portrait is fairly well known. After a frustrated, unsuccessful day of job hunting in the comic book field, he attacks some poor guy's picket fence, systematically snapping many fence rungs in 2...like a much more handsome version of the Incredible Hulk. When he gets home, he catches a glimpse of his enraged facial expression in the mirror and is immediately inspired to do a quickie, impressionist self portrait to capture that intense facial expression for posterity.
Before 1974 Frank never dated any of his paintings or drawings and he also didn't keep any sort of archives or notebook records as to when he drew or painted these artworks. For business reasons in 1974 he started dating and affixing copyright symbols to his paintings and drawings. However for the ones done before 1974 he had to go strictly by memory. Generally speaking his memory was pretty good, but sometimes he would get the year date wrong...sometimes WAY wrong. CONAN OF CIMMERIA(1969) is probably Frank's most famous misdated painting. This was FF's 1 and only Conan painting from 1969. A mere 5 years later he had forgotten this, but he DID remember that he did a group of Conan paintings in 1967 and figured the odds were good that this was 1 of them so he dated it 1967. Due to this, literally generations of the Frazetta Faithful have had the misunderstanding that Frank painted this painting in 1967 because the artist himself put that date on the painting. This is a bit of a roundabout way of me explaining that I'm pretty sure that FF's 1962 copyright for the SELF PORTRAIT is a close-but-no-cigar 1 year ahead of the actual year he painted it, which I'm now firmly convinced was 1961.
Frank spent the 1st half of 1961 penciling Al Capp's LI'L ABNER Sunday strips as an uncredited ghost artist. FF was on the verge of 7 years of doing this when he must have had the realization that he hadn't received a monetary raise in all that time. When he very reasonably asked Capp for a raise, Al instead perversely suggested that Frank deserved to get a pay CUT instead. FF angrily quit on the spot, cushy 1 day work week be damned! To the best of my knowledge nobody has ever pinpointed exactly WHEN in 1961 this abrupt blow up happened. Looking at the actual Sunday strips as evidence it seems to me Frank split from Capp in mid-June 1961. I'm saying this because the Sunday strips of LA from the last 6 months of 1961 find whichever combo of the remaining 3 ghosts slowly but surely phasing out the blatant sexuality of Frank's female characters. Also the overall drawings look less like Frazetta, and more like Archie Comics(not that there's anything WRONG with Archie Comics). As for Capp himself I'm guessing after FF's departure he still limited himself to scripting only(this might be the case for the daily LA as well). If Capp was in cost cutting mode it seems highly unlikely he would have hired another 4th ghost to replace Frank.
This all means that FF's unhappy job hunt, the snapped fence incident, and the angry self portrait all happened in fairly quick succession in the summer of 1961. Since there is a slim chance that Frank had ANOTHER unhappy job hunt in early 1962 I can't fully debunk the 1962 copyright date. However looking at his biographical facts as well as we know them I would say there's a 98% chance it was done in 1961 and a 2% chance in 1962. It is also unknown if FF's later misremembering that he had worked for Capp NINE years(instead of the actual 7 years from mid-1954 to mid-1961) ties in with the possibly incorrect 1962 date on the SELF PORTRAIT.
SELF PORTRAIT(1961 or 1962)(oil painting)(copyright 1962)
Reportedly FF limited his job search to only the comic book companies he had previously worked for(which numerically were quite a few, although some of them were not still in business by 1961). Frank in later years was convinced that Capp had somehow blacklisted him in the comic book/comic strip industries. This is quite possible considering Capp was a powerful media figure in the early 1960s. Not only was he a famous cartoonist, he was also a popular TV celebrity(no, I'm not kidding).
I've long thought it was too bad that FF had never looked for work at the then-newly named Marvel Comics and interviewed with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I'm pretty sure Stan and Jack would have greatly appreciated Frank's art past and present. Also 2 creators of Stan and Jack's high integrity probably would have spurned the immoral(and maybe illegal) blacklisting of an innocent man. Of course if Stan and Jack HAD hired FF then the rest of us would have been stuck in some kind of bizarre alternate reality where Frank Frazetta spent most(maybe all) of his life as a comic book/comic strip artist. As it turned out, everything worked out for the best for everyone...with Frank eventually becoming the greatest illustrator/fine artist of the 20th century. Of course he had no way of knowing THAT would happen in his dark and depressing days during the 2nd half of 1961.
I sometimes wonder if FF's apparent contempt/disdain for exact dates and personal archiving might be a particular pet peeve of men from his specific generation. My mother was born the exact same year as Frank(1928) and my father was born only 3 years earlier(1925) so they were all solidly within the same generation. Like FF, my parents were both Italian-Americans who never took a vacation to Italy in their lifetimes. Like Frank, my father's slightly older brother Arthur was a photography/camera buff who developed his own pictures in his own darkroom. Although my dad certainly had zero art talent, our consistently amusing family photos from the 1960s and the 1st half of the 1970s reveal he had a great eye for composition, and even a gift for staging. Like FF he also had a keen sense of humor.
During my parents' senior years I would often visit and have dinner with them(for the record Frank died in 2010, my dad died in 2019, my mom died in 2024). Invariably my dad would talk about 1 of our old vacations and he almost always got the year date wrong. Whenever I would gently/politely provide the correct year date he would always get annoyed and call me "Mr. Technical"(and believe me when I tell you this nickname wasn't meant to be taken in any sort of positive way). So to his way of thinking WHAT happened on the vacation was important, WHEN it happened was totally irrelevant. I actually completely disagree with this way of thinking. I think that WHEN something happened can be just as important as WHAT happened or WHY it happened. This is particularly true of Pop Culture. When you look at what Frazetta, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan were doing in 1963 and compare it to what they were doing in 1965, sure it is only 2 years time, but their artistic growth over those 2 years was staggering. Somewhat later in the timeline consider that Barry Windsor-Smith's truly mind blowing artistic evolution on Marvel's Conan comics flashed by in a mere 3 years(from CONAN THE BARBARIAN 1(1970) to SAVAGE TALES 3(1973)). Of course BWS deserves 100% credit for this. It wasn't as if the Marvel editorial staff was asking him(or requesting him) to become a much better artist. So yeah, dates matter. And ACCURATE dates really matter.
The original SELF PORTRAIT was a real rarity in Frank's art catalog. Although it was obvious that FF admired Rembrandt he didn't share the old master's knack for regular self portraits, but Frank would occasionally gift his handsome facial features to some of the male figures in his illustrations. THE DESTROYER is the best known example of this. The main figure of this composition is Conan(not Frank himself) and this was the only Conan painting where FF gave his own facial features to Conan. The beautiful pencil illustration SEX IN THE AFTERNOON(1962) is pretty fascinating now, comparing the different ways you can interpret it. We get a back view of a naked woman in the foreground so we can't see her face at all. The forward view of the man in the background clearly has Frank's facial features(FF would revisit this compositional strategy many times over the next few decades). Does this mean that FF is giving us a private glimpse of Frank and Ellie's marital bedroom? Is the guy literally him? Since we can't see the woman's face it is impossible to say with any certainty that it IS Ellie. Since nobody in the general public in 1962 knew what Frank Frazetta looked like this COULD be another case like THE DESTROYER where FF is simply giving his face to a fictional character and nobody then would know the difference anyway. Of course NOW we are very familiar with Frank's face.
THE DESTROYER
The 1995 SELF PORTRAIT pencil illustration recreation gets its best reproduction in the 2015 DOCDAVE WINIEWICZ FRAZETTA COLLECTION AUCTION CATALOG(although it pops up again a few years later as a nice alternate cover for HEAVY METAL magazine). DD provides a detailed blog on the creation of this piece in which he himself is a key figure motivating its very existence. Doc had purchased a nice camera and a matching set of lenses and offered to trade them to Frank for a FF pencil self portrait. This now intrudes upon the controversial subject of Frank trading more valuable pen/brush + ink or pencil drawings in exchange for less valuable cameras. In this particular case I think we need to cut DD a huge amount of slack here. All things being equal if Doc had asked Frank to do a pencil self portrait for FREE and just GIVE it to him most likely FF would have done so based on their friendship. Also I don't believe Frank evaluated these trades in MONETARY terms anyway and rather figured the time expenditure. FF knew for sure he could do a high quality self portrait in pencil in only 1 or 2 hours and that seemed to be a fair trade for a camera and lenses he really liked. After all, the man WAS a photography enthusiast!
Doc didn't request any particulars for the self portrait and he was quite surprised that Frank decided to revisit/recreate the earlier SELF PORTRAIT in pencil. Indeed this was FF's own idea. DD has gone on the record that Frank didn't look at himself in the mirror before doing the drawing. He also didn't bother to look at the earlier SELF PORTRAIT before so either(even though it was still in his possession). Rather FF just closed his eyes for a minute and mentally pictured the SELF PORTRAIT in his head with that amazing photographic memory of his and then quickly proceeded to draw it as rapidly as possible.
SELF PORTRAIT(1995)(PENCIL RECREATION)
The most interesting thing about the 1995 pencil version is that Frank appears to be the exact same age in both artworks despite the passage of 3.4 decades. Whether due to vanity or pride(or perhaps an admixture of both) FF felt compelled to depict himself in his physical prime. And if he wasn't in his physical prime in 1995 he was still capable of doing excellent art, and 1995 was a particularly productive year for him. Both writer/director/actor Woody Allen and director/producer/actor Clint Eastwood did precious little on- screen acting during their senior citizen years because neither of them were too keen on playing Grandpa roles. Likewise Frank had no interest in doing a Grandpa self portrait in 1995. FF later told DD: "I know what I look like." Perhaps he should have said: "I know what I looked like."
Another intriguing aspect of the repro of the 1995 drawing as seen in the auction catalog is that FF drew it on a piece of Marvel Comics art board which presumably was given(or mailed) to him by an admiring Marvel Comics penciler(or penciler/inker). Either on purpose or by accident, Frank turned the Marvel logo upside down before drawing his face on the paper. Doc's starting price for this piece in 2015 was $15000 to $20000. I have no idea what it sold for but I'm guessing more than the asking price(which would have been WAY more than the initial cost of the camera/lenses).
Another Frazetta artwork that exists because of his friendship with DD is the DOCDAVE WINIEWICZ PORTRAIT(1995). This is a good example of the cartoon realistic portrait(or the realistic cartoon portrait?) that Frank earlier pioneered with his RINGO STARR PORTRAIT(1964). I'm not fully sure if FF created this art genre, but he certainly popularized it with that Ringo portrait. The idea here is that the facial features are depicted in a satirical, cartoony way, but the art rendering is serious and convincingly realistic. For the DD portrait it looks like Frank combined watercolor and colored pencils for the final effect. So that's 2 FF artworks that we owe to Doc.
The original SELF PORTRAIT was debuted to the general public in less than ideal circumstances in the bootleg publication THE FRAZETTA TREASURY(1975) where it suffered the numerous indignities of being presented in a small size, in black and white(even though the oil painting original was in full color), and(adding insult to injury) the pirate publisher pulled a flippy-floppy by inexplicably printing the composition BACKWARDS. It took a few decades or so before the SELF PORTRAIT finally got the respect it deserved with an excellent reproduction as the back cover of Frank and Ellie's self-published FRANK FRAZETTA: BOOK ONE(1996). Needless to say, THEY didn't print it backwards.
EERIE 2(aka SORCERER)(1965)(oil painting)(copyright 1965)/(untitled)(1992)(partial pencil illustration recreation)(copyright 1992)
To the best of my knowledge Frank only did 1 oil painting in 1992 and zero oil paintings in 1993. My theory is during this time period he was concerned about the negative health effects the turpentine solvent used in oil paintings might be having on his then recently diagnosed thyroid condition. During this time he briefly switched to doing fully rendered pencil illustrations, although he would soon return to oil painting in 1994. (untitled) is a pencil illustration that focuses on recreating the demon figure from FF's EERIE 2 cover painting while completely discarding the wizard, the wide variety of creepy crawly figures, and the complex textures from that painting and replacing them with white negative space. Just as in earlier years FF would let the warm brown textured surface of masonite do much of the work for him in many of his masonite paintings, during this later phase he would smartly incorporate the white of the drawing paper into his carefully conceived compositions.
Looking at the demon in the original painting it is obvious Frank spent most of his painting time on the demon's highly detailed head with the demon's body being an almost abstract shape with his right arm practically an atmospheric suggestion. In the pencil illustration the demon's head gets the same amount of attention but FF devotes far more care in depicting the body with fully developed musculature given complete light and dark rendering. Frank repositions and redraws the demon's left arm. He also gives the pencil drawing a shot of humor by giving the demon a round, overweight pot belly...kind of like a supernatural Alfred Hitchcock figure.
(untitled) would have fit in beautifully within the FRAZETTA: ILLUSTRATIONS ARCANUM(1994) pencil illustration book, but it was omitted from this collection for some unknown reason(all of the pencil art pieces in the book are dated 1993, this one is dated 1992). It popped up years later in THE FANTASTIC WORLDS OF FRANK FRAZETTA(2022/2024) where it was a very welcome addition.
Frazetta's sophisticated pencil illustrations from the 1990s were almost comparable to his oil paintings. The only things missing were the full color and the modeling paste impasto textures(and, in all fairness, these modeled textures were not used in ALL of FF's oil paintings, just SOME of them).
EERIE 2(aka SORCERER)(1965)(oil painting)(copyright 1965)
The only all new element in the pencil illustration that wasn't seen in the original oil painting was in the foreground of the composition: an artfully arranged combo of 3 skulls and 5 slightly curvy rib cage bones(inserted into the ground). Call me morbid if you will, but I've alway enjoyed FF's lovingly detailed depictions of skulls and bones, a sort of consistent sub-theme that winds its way through many of his paintings and drawings from 1963 to 1996.
Among the generous selection of bonus features to be found in the 2 DVD Collector's Edition of FRAZETTA: PAINTING WITH FIRE(2004) a real standout was a start-to-finish filming of Frank doing a left handed pencil drawing of a charging jungle cat as a remarque for a limited edition print for the Frazetta Art Museum. While mostly filmed in real time there are a few sneaky time lapses to be spotted if you watch it closely enough. Director Lance Laspina was sitting just off-camera with Frank while he was doing the drawing and they talked while the drawing progressed. After FF does some assertive finger rubbing to soften the pencil tones and then starts erasing back into it to create some highlights, Lance asks Frank: "Are you worried that people will see how you do this?" FF immediately shoots back verbally with his unfailing wit: "Hey, you have to know where to put the drawing, kid." After the drawing is finished Frank considerately blasts it several times with fixative spray so the future customer won't smudge it.
HEADLESS HORSEMAN I(1995)(oil painting)/HEADLESS HORSEMAN II(date unknown)(oil repainting)
HEADLESS HORSEMAN I(1995)(oil painting)
I have to admit I was genuinely surprised when I saw the repainting of HEADLESS HORSEMAN I for the 1st time in July 2025(as far as I can tell the repro of it was 1st released to the general public only 2 months earlier in May 2025). This raises a fairly obvious question: is it possible there are still a few more Frazetta repaints lurking amongst the private collections of the FF heirs and spares(or other art collectors) that have yet to be seen by the rest of us outsiders? Or is HH I the final repainting to emerge with none to follow? I guess only time will tell.
For the past 2 decades I had believed that Frank didn't repaint any of his very impressive comeback paintings from the mid-1990s. Obviously THIS repainting proved me all wrong in that regard. As was the earlier case with DEATH DEALER V, I think I still slightly prefer the original, but the excellence of the repainting can not be denied. I had 1st seen the original HH I in Frank and Ellie's self-published FRANK FRAZETTA: BOOK ONE(November 1996). It is safe to say that book must have been published before FF did the repainting(otherwise the repainting would have been in it rather than the original) which means timing wise that the repainting was a left hander. If so, it is one of his best left handed paintings.
The original has a beautiful field of dark blue colors very nicely contrasted by the warmer earth-orange highlights on the HH figure himself. Franks puts red dots in the horse's eyes...strongly suggesting that the horse is in a state of demonic possession. Another somewhat odd touch is that the tip of the horse's nose is partially obscured by his right front leg/hoof. The frontal neckhole of the HH is a testament to FF's aversion to gory realism. He just renders it as a fairly abstract shape without depicting the severed neck bones within.
The repainting is a 100% repainting. Frank keeps the drawing and shaping of the HH figure consistent in both paintings, but his HH figure coloring in the repainting is far more subdued. The neckhole is still an abstract oval but seen with a more sideways perspective and somewhat collared by a dark rim shape that gives it extra definition. The biggest change in the repainting is the horse, who has been completely redrawn and reimagined. Whereas the horse in the original is obviously a supernatural creature, the horse in the repainting is just a hard charging, natural animal. In the repainting FF only shows the horse's front legs and puts extra emphasis on them by completely covering the horse's back legs with a violently agitated dust cloud. The blue coloring from the original is confined to the top half of the composition in the repainting and is substantially lightened. The bottom half features a wide variety of closely modulated non-blue colors that are mighty appealing.
It is probably worth mentioning that the HH I repainting has nothing to do with HEADLESS HORSEMAN II(1995). HH II is a completely different composition/painting compared to HH I. The only thing they have in common is the same HH character(plus horse). For the record, I greatly prefer HH I and its repainting over the more brightly colored and cheerful HH II.
HEADLESS HORSEMAN II (date unknown)(oil repainting)
