Gallo: On the other hand, though, it does open up the conversation. I think these are conversations that I’ve been hearing about for years on the writer side and in conventions. They would happen in a room this big with twenty people in it, and it would just go away, and now that these conversations are online, sure, you get the trolling, and it’s annoying when you get so many negative responses. But what’s funny is, so many people are very surprised at how well formed the argument is, because it’s new to them. They’re like, “Whoa! Why am I being blindsided by this?” And we’re like, “No, we’ve been talking about it for ten years. You just didn’t hear it.”
Panepinto: We’ve been practicing this conversation for years!
Robinson: I know a lot of women artists who have experienced very painful interactions because they are women, but it’s an internet thing. I was having a conversation on Facebook the other day with artist Hannah Christenson about where did all the women illustrators go? And a bunch of guys got on the thread and were talking about how it was all biological that men are just better illustrators. On her Facebook page! It was her Facebook page, this female art director and female artist, talking about this thing, kind of in a quiet conversation, and these random strangers popped on and took over the conversation.
Then she and I started IMing. The conversation was like, “I wish that some of these young female artists would have this conversation that we’re having!” So I made the Women in Fantastical Illustration Facebook group just for that reason. Overwhelmingly, the majority of illustrators have had the same experience. It’s something very common, but I think that’s sort of the new online post-feminist backlash, kind of a men’s rights chamber on the internet.
Guay: I think we have to take that with a grain of salt, because there’s always the occasional total bonehead who loves to just make something about you public. They do it just to be annoying. But I don’t think it’s a pervasive attitude. I stay away from those dialogues as often as possible because they deflect the attention from the places where I most want to send it. Because of course my ire goes up when someone’s an asshole, and it’s so frequent that people are assholes on the internet that you have to pick your moment. So I step away from those because the power is in the example I set. It’s there that you inspire the up-and-coming artists. That’s where I want my energy and voice to go.
Gallo: That is where the most power lies, definitely. Although there is a reason why when anybody says, “Who are the women in fantasy illustration?” you can name the same five people for the last fifteen years. And two of them are here! [Rebecca Guay and Julie Bell]. The other one is Kinuko Craft and the other one is Terese Nielsen. It becomes difficult. In the past ten years, it’s difficult to name anybody beyond that, right? Who is it beyond that? Rowena Morrill, Diane Dillon of Leo and Diane Dillon . . .
Julie Dillon, that was an issue you addressed after your nomination for the Hugo Award last year, correct? The fact that’s it’s so hard to name off women in fantasy illustration?
Dillon: Honestly, while I was hugely honored and humbled by the nomination, it also felt a little strange, because there are so many other amazing women who have been working the field much longer than I have, who have not been nominated for that award yet. I really felt like they should have been recognized before me. The male artists who have been nominated over the years are well deserving and wonderful people, but there are so many amazing women out there who just don’t seem to make it into the circles of award nominees with the same frequency that men do. I made that tumblr post (juliedillon.tumblr.com/post/66217741265/big-huge-list-of-some-amazing-women-artists) listing all the women artists I could find, because oftentimes people seem to have a hard time naming more than a handful of women artists. I wanted to have a big compilation that I could point to whenever someone claimed that there just weren’t that many women artists out there.
Gallo: There are many up-and-coming women and hopefully it sticks, but I think there’s always been the up-and-coming and there’s always been attrition amongst women illustrators. And if you want to talk about women, talk about people of color . . . That is a much bigger, harder question.
Guay: At this year’s Illustration Masters Class, there were no African-American students. And usually there is only one, maybe two. It’s a catch-22. I find it easier to paint Caucasian skin, so I tend to paint that. Because there aren’t as many African-American artists in the field, there’s fewer paintings of African-Americans in the art. And so it’s a terrible circle.
Robinson: I think that comes down to [the way] that art shows who is invited to the table. In college, I had just gotten a job as an art director at Fantasy Flight, and I was visiting my college roommate, who was black, and her family. Her little cousin, who was like eight, looked at me with tears in her eyes, and asked me if I could do some black heroes, because she loved fantasy, but she just didn’t have any black heroines, and she wanted stuff that was like her. It’s been surprisingly difficult to get that to happen. There’s this board game I played that was cyberpunk, and one of the characters is an Indian woman. The marketing guy played with his wife and his wife’s best friend, who happens to be Indian. She saw the character and just, her eyes lit up. She grabbed it and it’s become her favorite game. She connected with that visual of her ideal self.
Bell: It has to do with who’s buying it. Honestly, in my experience, most of the people buying my work are men. I’ve definitely had a few people who were collectors of mine who were different races than white, but most of them have been white men.
Gallo: People with money. People with access.
Panepinto: I think it’s an interesting marketing question. Decisions are being made to market to the people who are buying these things, but you are also always talking about expanding markets. We run into that in publishing all the time. We had to deal with the Joe Abercrombie cover with Best Served Cold. The main character is a girl so I put a girl on the cover and everyone freaked out “Why is there a girl on the cover?” And I wanted to say “Talk to the author! He wrote the book!” A lot of the fan base was like, “There should be a guy on the cover because it’s a ‘guy’ book even if it is a girl character.” I wonder, again, how much of it is that that reaction is on the internet, right? I wonder how much of marketing is bound by precedent and how much of it is bound by the vocal minority.
Dillon: My hope for publishers (and people deciding on award nominations) is for them to be more open-minded when it comes to style and approach. When something is published, it helps gives artists and art styles more legitimacy, opening the door for more viewpoints and perspectives. All people have a lot to offer, and when we pigeonhole one group as the only way to be good at one thing, it cuts off the possibility of a broader range of viewpoints and fresh ideas and approaches, which further locks us into the same patterns.
Something that is often brought up when discussing attrition rates of women artists is the effect of motherhood upon a woman’s career. Rebecca Guay and Julie Bell both raised children in addition to having successful illustration and art careers. Can you talk about that?
Guay: I remember when I was pregnant, another woman said, “I wonder what you are going to do when you have your baby because you won’t have as much time to work on your art,” and my head almost exploded under the concept that somebody thinks in a practical way that I can give up the art. First of all, I couldn’t. Second of all, give up my paying job? Because I’m going to have a baby? So, there’s a weird thing about having a baby and being an artist. Being a mom is wonderful, but being an artist is what I am. I remember nursing Vivian and working on Magic cards while holding her in my lap. I was back to painting when she was just a few days old.
Bell: I wasn’t working professionally as an artist when my children were born; if I had been getting money for my art, it might have been a different thing, I don’t know. It was a struggle. It was a matter of knowing I needed to do art and making time to work on it in spite of the fact that it
wasn’t a career yet.
Panepinto: And a whole other conversation is that none of the three art directors present have children. And my joke answer, which is not always a joke answer, is, “I have fifty cover babies every month!” which is not really an answer, I know. But you see on Facebook these two women artists who just had babies in the last month and are working on their freelance jobs. Women are figuring it out.
Leggett: Sometimes paying the rent wins. Sometimes having better insurance wins. This is especially true for parents. We are not losing our female illustrators fresh out of art school because they are female and being discriminated against. We are losing them because what we do is viewed by most of society as a luxury and not a necessity. Luxuries are the first things to go when the cash gets sluggish. Illustration is a dream job. It is a calling. It is a chance to get paid for getting all of the images swimming around in your skull out into the world. It is not, however, necessarily financially wise. The competition, as I mentioned before, is fierce. An illustrator has to find gigs, keep up with the sales and the business end, attend conferences to make the connections, make deadlines no matter what, and, in their copious spare time, create art.
Guay: And it’s just logistics that you’re exhausted as a mom, and if you happen to have a husband who is working a full-time job and you were working as a full-time illustrator and you have a baby, and there’s any other way that money might come in the door, it’s easy to slowly slip away and slowly do less and less. But my income was the primary income in our family. It was hard, but in some ways it was lucky, because I had to keep working. And you know you are never going to stop . . . but maybe if I hadn’t had as solid a career prior to having a baby, if I had had a baby when I was twenty-five or twenty-six and I was still on unsure footing in terms of myself as an artist, and I hadn’t solidified my career, maybe I could have drifted. I think that could happen to a lot of women and maybe that is why some potential up-and-comers just at the point that they are starting to get traction have a baby. Women still do carry most of the weight of caregiving for small children.
Bell: I remember when my kids were still babies, and I had a moment when I felt my head was going to split because I wanted to be doing my art now but I knew that five minutes from now I’m going to have to do something with the baby. I remember thinking to myself, “wait, does this mean I can’t do this art or what?” and I told myself, “no, you have a brain and you can teach yourself to shift back and forth.” I just had to teach my brain to be a lot more flexible than it had been, had to really consciously train myself. And then it wasn’t until my kids were eight and ten when I started making a name for myself with my art. And by that time it was easier. When they are babies, you are so exhausted, and you just need to realize that will pass and you’ll get your feet under you again.
Guay: I have heard this so often from women coming to the Illustration Masters Class: “I was starting to get work, I was starting to get traction, but then I had my baby.” I hear that so often. And it’s just what it is, and it’s hard, and you just need the fortitude to come back to it if you have gotten derailed. And some people might not have the energy for that uphill climb, because it is an uphill climb to establish yourself in this field.
Panepinto: Last year during the Women in Fantasy panel at Spectrum, when Tara McPherson was there and she had brought their young child—I forget how old Tara was but I think she’s in her early thirties—and she said she very consciously made the decision that she wasn’t going to have a child until her career had gotten to that point that she could survive. She knew she was going to have to coast for a year, so she waited until she would be okay. People wouldn’t forget about her in the year she was focusing more on taking care of an infant.
Guay: Being a mom shakes your brain up. There’s crazy brain chemistry that happens. You are just a different person after. And for some people, the need to make art might not be there afterwards. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Bell: And having a baby is a great thing! It’s very fulfilling! And it’s totally fine if someone could feel very satisfied and happy in that role and puts other stuff on the back shelf.
Guay: There’s a lot of women who come to the Illustration Masters Class who fit this description. There’s Kim Kincaid: She’s a great example of coming back to an art career late and experiencing great growth. Teresa N. Fischer is another example of someone who came back to painting seriously after her child was older.
Gallo: She’s doing so phenomenal right now.
Guay: So you can come back, it just takes a few years. I think that a lot of people just get lost along the way.
Bell: These two artists had their kids and then they got a little older and felt more of the confidence and the power in themselves and believed in themselves enough so that they could do this thing.
Gallo: As you talk about community, hopefully the internet (for whatever it’s worth with all the trolls and jerks there are) and with the question of whether attrition will happen in this generation, having groups like the Facebook group Zoë started and being able to talk online and talk about these issues will keep people moving and not so isolated.
Panepinto: I was shocked! Zoë started that Facebook group and within three days there was over a hundred and fifty women having enthusiastic twenty-four-hour conversations! I couldn’t keep up with it! They were so thoughtful and amazing and great, and so excited to just to hear that other people were thinking similar things.
Robinson: Yeah, those people were really hungry to talk in a safe space.
Any final words of advice that you would give to other women seeking a career as an SF illustrator?
Robinson: Do good work!
Dillon: Do what you want to do. Don’t worry about what is expected of you, or what style or field you think will command the most respect, or whether or not it feels like you belong, and just do what feels most genuine to you. Do what you love with your whole heart, and things will work out, even if it’s not in the way you first imagined when you started out.
Gallo: Keep at it. There’s a lot of setbacks for everybody, so make sure you keep working.
Guay: It wouldn’t be any different than advice I’d give to any artist.
Bell: Be intelligent, work hard, work smart.
Leggett: Know yourself and know what really are your dreams. Know the difference between wishes and needs in yourself. Give time and make financial and emotional decisions that support those needs. Network with others dealing with these decisions. Feed your creative need every chance you can, even if it is after two days of double shifts. If you have children, share your joy of art with them. If you decide to pursue it, be courageous! This is a very tough gig, but so worth it!
Panepinto: Make sure you keep in mind that you deserve it as much as the other guy, to speak to the confidence problem. It seems so cheesy, but just believe that you have the right to be there. Don’t doubt it.
Dillon: Everyone has an important viewpoint to offer the world. And if your chosen field doesn’t tend to have many voices like yours, your unique viewpoint is all the more valuable (even if everyone doesn’t see it that way right away).
—With thanks to Zoe Kaplan for doing the lion’s share of transcribing the audio portion of this interview.
© 2014 by Galen Dara.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Galen Dara sits in a dark corner listening to the voices in her head. She has a love affair with the absurd and twisted, and an affinity for monsters, mystics, and dead things. She has illustrated for 47North, Edge Publishing, Lightspeed, Fireside Magazine, Apex Publications, Lackington’s, and Goblin Fruit. Recent book covers include War Stories, Glitter & Mayhem, and Oz Reimagined. She won the 2013 Hugo for Best Fan Artist and is nominated for the 2014 Hugo for Best Professional Artist. Her website is galendara.com, and you can follow her on Twitter @galendara.
Artist Gallery
Julie Bell, Julie Dillon, Rebecca Guay, Elizabeth Leggett
Julie Bel
l’s credits include creating advertising illustrations for the elite of the corporate world, such as Nike, Coca-Cola, and The Ford Motor Company, painting book covers for the major publishing houses in NYC, or doing album covers for artists such as Meat Loaf. She was the first woman ever to paint Conan for Marvel Comics, which paved the way for many other commissions from Marvel, DC, and Image Comics to illustrate superheroes in fully rendered paintings. In 2000, she was given an assignment to do the covers of Jane Lindskold’s Firekeeper saga, a series of fantasy novels that starred a large wolf with magic powers. The success of that first wolf painting brought more animal assignments as well as private commissions, which included horses. Now she is finding a new sense of herself in painting the animals just as they are, without supernatural powers.
[To view the gallery, turn the page.]
Julie Dillon is a Hugo and Chesley Award-winning, World Fantasy Award-nominated science fiction and fantasy artist, with clients such as Penguin Books, Simon & Schuster, Tor Books, and Wizards of the Coast.
[To view the gallery, turn the page.]
Rebecca Guay has been painting professionally for twenty years, during which time she built a formidable reputation in contemporary and pop culture art and illustration. She has exhibited in both solo and group shows at renowned galleries and museums including the R. Michelson Galleries and The Allentown Museum of Art, as well as the Eric Carle Museum, and has been acquired into the permanent collection of the American Museum of Illustration at the Society of Illustrators in NYC. An ARC 2013 and 2014 finalist, Rebecca has also been the recipient of many significant awards and honors, including numerous gold medal awards from the Spectrum Annual and several Gold and Bronze Medals from the Society of Illustrators West Annual for Best in the Original Works/Gallery category, and she is currently nominated for a Chesley Award. In addition to her career as an artist, she is also the creator of The Illustration Master Class (illustrationmasterclass.com) and SmArt School (smarterartschool.com).
Fantasy Magazine Issue 58, Women Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue Page 24