Fantastic Art: An Interview with Vincent Chong
I first became aware of the work of British fantasy artist Vincent Chong a few years ago, during the time when I was running the website and looking after the marketing side of things for PS Publishing and I've been a huge fan ever since.
The first piece of his work I encountered was the absolutely gorgeous wrap-around covers for Joe Hill's long sold-out and much sought-after debut collection Twentieth Century Ghosts (see below for front panel artwork) and ever since then, PS head honcho Pete Crowther has asked Vincent to supply a steady stream of cover images for his titles.
He's not the only publisher to have taken note, either, as Vincent's work now graces an ever-growing range of book covers from various UK and US independents, including Subterranean Press, Pendragon Press and Screaming Dreams.
For the past two years Vincent has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist - in the process ending a five-year run of wins by one of my other very favourite artists, Les Edwards - a clear indication of his growing stature and popularity among the UK's genre fiction fans.
The aspect of Vincent's work that has always most impressed me is his incredible use of texture and tone to create a disquieting, almost menacing mood in his pieces. As a result his work tends to be imbued with a genuinely haunting, unsettling, atmosphere that always suits the books he works with perfectly.
Take a look at these examples of his art and design work and then visit the galleries at www.vincentchong-art.co.uk for many more examples:
20th Century Ghosts, variant #1
20th Century Ghosts, variant #2
Fool Moon
The Boys
![The Steel Remains (c) Vincent Chong, cover art for the Subterranean Press edition of the Richard [K] Morgan novel](http://www.thegenrefiles.com/wp-content/uploads/chong_steel_remains.jpg "The Steel Remains (c) Vincent Chong, cover art for the Subterranean Press edition of the Richard [K] Morgan novel")
The Steel Remains
I dropped Vincent a line and put a few questions to him about his work and this is what he told me:
DT: You've developed a wonderful signature style full of muted, swirling colours, shadow and darkness, that clearly draws inspiration from a wide range of sources. Who, or what, are your major influences? Who are your favourite artists, authors, film directors?
Vincent Chong: When I was younger I was really into the Amercian superhero style of comic art and Fantasy artists such as Boris Vallejo and Luis Royo, which I've now moved away from a bit. These days I'm more inspired by comic artists like Ashley Wood and Ben Templesmith, and recently I've been drawn to Mike Mignola's more graphic style. I also really loved HR Giger's nightmarish imagery and the surreal compositions of Salvador Dali. A major influence is the work of Dave McKean, whose mixed-media approach played a big part in inspiring my own style.
Aside from various artists I also draw inspiration from photography, album packaging design, music videos, movie posters, and movies themselves. The photography and music videos of Floria Sigismondi (who did some early Marilyn Manson videos) were an influence early on. My favourite film director is Jean Pierre Jeunet, the French director of Amelie and Delicatessen and I also love the work of Tim Burton and Guillermo Del Toro. All three have a very strong visual style and create fantastical worlds in their films that suck you in.
DT: What sort of production techniques do you employ? Do you have a preference for digital or analog methods? Or do you find that a blend of the two produces the most effective results?
Vincent Chong: I put together all my final artwork digitally, but typically, in the process of creating a piece of art, I employ various other methods of working as well. I use a lot of photography , but also combine it with drawn and painted elements and scanned-in found objects and created textures. Sometimes I also make sculptural elements that I then photograph and incorporate into an image.
So it's not so much having a preference for either digital or analog methods, but using a mixture of both to achieve the result I want. For me, the advantages of putting together the final image digitally, is that it gives me greater scope to experiment, as a lot of the time it's easier and quicker to change things around digitally.
DT: You've already illustrated book covers for some of the biggest names in genre fiction. But are there any authors whose work you haven't been asked to interpret yet that you'd particularly like to illustrate in the future?
Vincent Chong: I've been very fortunate that I've had the chance to illustrate the works of some great authors. I was a big fan of Stephen King's books when I was growing up and never thought that one day I'd actually be illustrating his work. But now, I think I'm more keen to have the opportunity to one day illustrate something that I've written myself. I've enjoyed interpreting the work of various authors, but I would like to be able to illustrate something entirely of my own creation. I've had the beginnings of ideas in the past, but haven't ever written anything properly, so I don't even know if this is something I could do, but I'd like to give it a try one day...
DT: You're best known as a cover artist and that's clearly keeping you very busy. But are there any other avenues that you're keen to explore? Any other media that you'd be interested in working in down the line?
Vincent Chong: I'd love to do more artwork and design for album packaging and maybe do some work for the film industry – either with movie posters or concept art. I've done a few projects creating artwork for websites - for online games and book trailers and such - which were quite interesting to do, as the artwork had to be animated which provided different challenges from doing the usual print stuff, so I wouldn't mind exploring the multimedia avenue more. I'd also like to explore photography further. I use a lot of photography in my illustration work now anyway, but I'd like to try doing some more straight-forward photography without as much digital manipulation.
I always thought it'd be cool to do get the chance to be a film-maker, but I think it's one of those ideas that sounds great in my head, but in practice I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy it, and it's not an area that I have much knowledge in at the moment, so it's not something I'm particularly focusing on right now, but in the future, who knows?
DT: How has winning the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist for the last two years affected your profile? Have any commissions come about as a direct result?
Vincent Chong: It's hard to know if any commissions have come about directly as a result of the awards wins, but I think it's definitely helped to raise my profile around the world and bring attention to my work to those who had never heard of me before. I've noticed a steady increase in the traffic to my website over the last couple of years, and I've been getting more enquiries and commissions, so it seems that there's been a growing awareness of my work, and I think the awards wins helps to establish my reputation a bit more.
DT: What do you think are going to be the major challenges facing fantasy artists in the next 5 or 10 years? And what do you think are the major opportunities?
Vincent Chong: With the current economic situation around the world, I think there's always going to be some worry about whether artists will be able to find work, especially as I think it's quite easy for publishers to turn more to cheaper alternatives, such as creating artwork in-house or using stock photography.
However, with the web and new technologies I think there are more and more opportunities for artists to exploit these days. It's getting easier for artists to get their work out there and seen by a large worldwide audience with faster internet speeds and the increasing ways to showcase work online – through blogs, online gallery and community art sites, as well as the various social networking sites. And with ever improving print-on-demand services as well, it opens up the opportunity for artists to self-publish as another avenue to get their work out there.
I also think new artists are adapting to the new technology and software available to them and it's no longer the case that, for example, an illustrator would just be creating material for print, but they may also cross over into other areas as well, such as providing content for websites or other media.
Many thanks indeed to Vincent for taking the time away from his creative work to answer those questions and for his permission to borrow some of the images from his gallery, all of which remain copyright (c) Vincent Chong, of course.
Do be sure to visit www.vincentchong-art.co.uk and check out Vincent's portfolio.
Very Special Offer from PS Publishing
My very good friend Pete Crowther, head honcho of the legendary PS Publishing, has just announced a set of very special offers to mark PS's tenth anniversary in 2009.
From now until the end of next year, you'll be able to buy an anniversary box-set of PS novellas (trade or jacketed editions) or novels / collections (trade or slipcased editions) at a very special price. Each box will contain 10 pre-2008 titles (all different, randomly selected by PS, no requests for specific titles). It's a great way to dip into some of truly fantastic genre fiction from the UK's leading specialist independent genre publisher and - who knows? - maybe discover a new favourite author or two in the process.
Visit the PS Publishing News Room for full details.
Busy, y'say..?
Absolutely run off my feet at the moment; mostly with work-related projects, which is absolutely great.
In brief:
Jo and I were guests of Pete and Nicky Crowther (of PS Publishing fame) last weekend, at their absolutely wonderful home on the East Yorkshire coast. Their house is one of our very favourite places on the entire planet: partly because it contains a veritable cornucopia of sf stuff - books, toys, DVDs, memorabilia; decades worth, and it would take a decade to read / watch / play with it all - but mostly because it's home to Pete and Nicky, who are two of our very favourite people (an opinion widely shared in genre fiction circles, I know) and spending time with them is always an absolute joy. We ate, we drank, we laughed. A lot. Of all three. And we watched Hollywoodland, which was... interesting. Dark, and definitely... interesting.
We also thrashed out a last few remaining issues on the PS website re-build, which means I'll now be able to crack on with that project as soon as possible. Got another few jobs to finish as well, all of which are tantalisingly close to completion, as well as a few new ones in the pipeline. Plus, I'm off down to London on Thursday to have lunch with a few of the fine folks from Gollancz Books and meet with a certain Mssr. Lynch, a word-smith whose acquaintance I'm absolutely dying to make. Will tell you all about it later next week, all being well.
Then on Friday afternoon Jo and I are heading down to Derby for Saturday's Alt.Fiction event, which I'm also thoroughly looking forward to. It'll be a great chance for us to catch up with a whole load of fantastic people that we haven't seen since last year's Fantasycon (or perhaps last month's Eastercon, or even last weekend...) and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk to everyone I've been saying "catch you at Alt.Fiction!" to for the past few weeks. Packed panel programme allowing.
So, yes, incredibly hectic schedule just now, absolutely loads going on. And I'm afraid that it does all rather mean that I might not be posting properly until after the weekend. I'll do my best to prep a couple of bookish entries sooner rather than later. Six hours of quite, quite wonderful reading time on the train to and from London on Thursday should help no end with that. Luxury!
New Arrivals - mid December '06
Another batch of books have come in for the Books Received section of UKSFBN, and once again there are a couple of pearls included that I'd particularly like to bring to your attention:
Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie
This one's going to cause me a real scheduling headache. Joe Abercrombie's debut novel, The Blade Itself was my definite fantasy highlight of 2006. It was an absolutely superb low-fantasy saga; chock full of action, adventure and incident, shot through with a very dry, witty sense of humour, and with none of the pomposity that the heroic fantasy genre is so prone to. Great reading, absolutely flew through it, Jo loved it as well. Part 2? Hell, yeah! (or, as Jo quite literally said upon picking up the book not ten minutes ago, "oooh! oooh!")
So, this one really demands to be shunted right to the front of my 'must read' queue... except that K.J. Parker's Evil for Evil is already occupying that spot, and I definitely want to read that one for pretty much the same reasons. And then I've got the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, John Connolly's Nocturnes and Gail Martin's The Summoner coming up hard on the rails... damn! Decisions, decisions...
The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
Another Gollancz proof that arrived in the same batch as the Abercrombie. I've been hearing some mixed background buzz about this one for a while; some say 'good', some say 'not sure'. But it looks like it'll fit into an oeuvre that I do have a definite affection for; you'd probably have to call it 'quasi-Victorian humourous melodrama' or something. Or then again, maybe not...
But you know the stuff I mean, anyway: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Mark Gattiss' The Vesuvius Club - which coincidentally I'd started reading the day before this one turned up - for instance. And I could theoretically include the recent Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G.W. Dahlquist in there as well, although to be honest that one was comparatively top-heavy on the melodrama and rather devoid of humour.
Hmmm. More headaches...
No Dominion by Charlie Huston
Not one that'll immediatly challenge for must-read top-spot, but a definite medium-term contender. This is the second in Charlie Huston's current series about a vampire-gang-dominated New York; no place for a determined loner vampire like Joe Pitt, who just wants to be left alone to live his un-death in peace. But his staunch neutrality makes him useful - and also potentially dangerous - to a whole range of factions in the continually ongoing gang turf war, so peace and quiet are likely to be two commodities in short supply.
Thoroughly enjoyed the first book in the series, Already Dead, after Jo bought a US copy from Amazon and then hit me with it until I agreed to read it. Urban vamp meets hard-boiled private eye, with everything wrapped up in a dark, grungy atmosphere that you could choke on. Orbit will be releasing the first couple of volumes in the UK early next year.
.
And finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention the three latest titles from PS Publishing, which also came in today: Julian - A Christmas Story by Robert Charles Wilson, Flavors of My Genius by Robert Reed, and The Voyage of Night Shining White by the much talked-about Chris Roberson. All, as it happens, with stunning artwork from a certain Les Edwards (or Edward Miller) as well.
All three look very interesting indeed, so that's three more for the already-groaning t.b.r. shelf... one day I really will have to win the lottery, just so I can actually afford the time to sit down and read all this potentially rather excellent material. I tell you, it's the only way it's ever going to happen...
More season's greetings…
I also love being on PS Publishing's Xmas card list:
The artwork here is by Tomislav Tikulin, who also painted the striking cover of the recent PS title The Voyage of Night Shining White by Chris Roberson.
2007 - The Year of the Short Story?
I'm anticipating a significant up-turn in the amount of reading time I have available as of the start of 2007. The year-long decorating project is almost done (short version: we had a major house extension built between July '05 to Feb '06 and have been painting over bare plaster ever since...) and that should give me my Sunday afternoons back, for reading, blogging, computer gaming, etc. (cue my lovely wife, Jo, muttering something along the lines of "nice try, mister..." as she dusts off the list marked 'additional chores: urgent'...)
So anyway, I'm hoping to read a lot more short fiction next year.
I know from long experience, both as a bookseller and, latterly, a review 'zine editor, that short fiction as a general form does have its detractors. Mostly they're folks who say that they prefer to invest longer amounts of time in the fiction they read; that they like to get involved in a fulll-length novel and really connect with the characters, plots and situations; or, rather typically, that they "don't like the way short stories always seem to stop just as they're getting interesting".
Well, I agree with the first few sentiments expressed, but I agree more with the countless commentators (I'm really not going to try to claim credit for this as any sort of original thought on my part) who point out that these folks have rather missed the point of good short fiction with that last objection.
A good short story delivers a short, sharp, hit - in what could be either or both of the narcotic and pugilistic senses - of, well, something. Catharsis, revelation, speculation, imagery, intrigue, bafflement... something. And if that means that they do stop "just as they're getting interesting", well, perhaps that was the whole point of the story; perhaps the writer fully intended to leave the reader hanging, suspended in a moment of contemplation, intrigued and desiring further resolution. That's often how and why some short stories stay with you long after you've read them, a pin-prick of bright memory amidst the bulk of dull, grey matter, and so forth.
Fair enough, if that's not your cup of tea - if, say, you'd generally rather listen to a two-hour concept album than a compilation mix-CD - then that's fine, of course. But personally, I love that hit of... whatever... and as I am rather hopelessly addicted to variety in both literature and music, and short fiction surely seems the best way to satisfy the former craving.
And I reckon there are enough good writers out there - and enough publishers with the good sense to make sure that their work sees the light of day - to keep me well-stocked with premium material pretty much all year round, if I wanted to. I know I've got any number of anthologies and collections on the shelves that I've yet to dive into.
I'm reading the latest two issues of PS Publishing's always excellent (and multiple award-winning) Postscripts magazine at the moment [declaration of possible bias: I'm a PS staffer, having run the PS website for a number of years, but hey, ask anyone how good Postscripts is and you'll hear the same thing, and anyway, why the hell haven't you subscribed yet..?] and then I've got five issues of D.F. Lewis's Nemonymous lined up as well. And I'm thinking of trying to pick up pretty much one of everything published by Andrew Hook's Elastic Press - although I can already make a start on Mike O'Driscoll's The Unbecoming, which I snapped up in the Fantasycon dealers' room - and then Chris Teague's Pendragon Press will most likely be raided as well.
Not that I'll be giving up on novels entirely of course. There's just far too much must-read meterial already on the shelf, and a whole stack of potentially great stuff lined up for next year. But I would like to broaden my horizons - horribly cramped as they've become due to the lack of commuter reading-time since May and the aforementioned self-inflicted slave labour - and what better way to satiate my fiction-flavoured cravings than with a whole series of short, sharp hits?
Feel free to recommend particulalry strong collections and / or anthologies in the comments there, folks (and yes, I have already read Joe Hill's Twentieth Century Ghosts, and yes, it was bloody marvellous...)
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