Today we are running the second half of our phone interview with award-winning illustrator and author Stephen Hickman. Stephen Hickman’s work has earned him five Chesley Awards from the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists. In 1994, he was awarded a Hugo Award for Best Original Art Work for the United States Postal Service’s Space Fantasy Commemorative Booklet of stamps, the first speculative genre series by the USPS.

All covers and illustrations used in this interview were created by Stephen Hickman. Visit his official website for more information about this artist and to view a gallery of his work.

IFP: Most of us think of you as a painter, but you created a statue of Cthulhu, can you tell me a bit about that?

SH: Actually, not only did I do a Cthulhu statue, I did a portrait bust of Lovecraft for Bowen Designs. It’s interesting that you should mention that because I was talking with them about doing an updated re-issue of both of those sculptures. That will be good news for fans.

The original issues are going for upwards of $700 from their original $100 price. I’ve had a lot of inquiries since the production stopped and there’s a possibility we’ll see them again.

The Hay Library in Providence that has the original handwritten Lovecraft manuscripts has said that when they exhibit them, both my sculptures are exhibited in the case along with the manuscripts. I haven’t seen them, but the last time I spoke with the curator, they mentioned doing that.

IFP: Doing something like Lovecraft where he talks unnameable things and indescribable things, does it make it harder to create the art? Or is it easier because he doesn’t give you a blow-by-blow description of the creatures?

SH: He’s a heartbreakingly difficult writer to illustrate. I was having this exact same conversation with the late Roy Krenkel, who was a wonderful character; he said he wouldn’t even try to illustrate Lovecraft. Because, as you know, the most interesting stuff is invisible and has an eldritch aroma. As his letters to Robert Howard point out, if you describe something flat-footed as walking into the room instead of the effect or describing it indirectly in another manner, you do not evoke that sense of strangeness if you were in the presence of a creature like that. Unless you search through the stories, every once in a while you can come up with a theme. Like that oil painting I did, from “The Temple”. At the Mountains of Madness has a lot of visual scenes that I’d like to get to sometime. Or “Pickman’s Model”. But I’m not interested in painting ghouls, too bad. But there are some visuals in there. Or if you were doing characters from “The Dunwich Horror”, you could do the Whateley family. They would be fun.

When I moved to Red Hook, New York, I thought, “Wow, I’m going to live where Lovecraft set a story.” I was disappointed to find out there is a Red Hook in Brooklyn, which is where the story is set.

IFP: If you could be a character or a creature from a Lovecraft story, who would you be?

SH: That’s tough. The chap who wandered off into the Arctic waste. Probably him or Erich Zann. There are characters you can easily identify with. I don’t have this id thing that makes me want to turn into a monster. I want to be a good guy. I identify with the professor in “The Dunwich Horror” who was boiling powder to make the Elder God appear and who came up with the incantation. The old dude who got bumped off in “The Call of Cthulhu” because he knew too much.

I can identify readily with Clark Ashton Smith characters. Smith was a brilliant writer. Lovecraft was odd. From what I read, he didn’t anticipate that a lot of his stuff would be published, which surprises me. He wrote his stuff for himself. These characters that Weird Tales was publishing, people whose names you can’t ever remember, they were very popular and everything they wrote was printed. Then the stories that are enduring and last were Lovecraft. The editor of Weird Tales rejected “Call of Cthulhu”, at first. August Derleth or some other person happened to be in the office, saw the manuscript and mentioned that another editor of a rival magazine had asked Lovecraft to send it to him if it was rejected. So the editor accepted it.

Lovecraft was very idiosyncratic. He was a writer’s writer. He crafted these things, no pun of words intended, just to please him. He didn’t even like the best thing he ever wrote, his finest story, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”. It’s a brilliant story. It has levels and levels to it. It has a beautiful evocation of Providence. His love of his surroundings is one of the charming features that makes the horror element so horrific by contrast. It is an absolutely elegant horror story. And he didn’t like it. But I think it is his one novel, unless you want to count At the Mountains of Madness as a novel.

IFP: Now, you mentioned Clark Ashton Smith as someone you really enjoy. What are some other writers that you are drawn to?

SH: As far as writers who can evoke a magic, a reality, I would put Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft at the top, and very close to them, I would put Howard Pyle, widely regarded as father of the American illustrator. He created the Brandywine school of painters. Three generations.

Well, talk about multi-tasting. He’d paint these brilliant illustrations and he’d be dictating books like The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. These are very carefully crafted, with archaic language. His use of language was genius. The Story of King Arthur and his Knights. There’s three volumes on the Arthurian legends. His use of archaism is easily the most effective of the Arthurian legends, the most readable, because he can see all this stuff. Robin Hood is lyrical because it so visual. He illustrated it within the style of Dürer.

The modern writers, I’d have to say my two favourites recently are Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Neal is the finest living science fiction/fantasy writer that we’ve got. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon has this encyclopedic overview of his subject, but he is such a flaming nut that his work is not accessible. His most famous work is Gravity’s Rainbow, which is thorough. Stephenson has that brilliance, but it is more accessible and entertaining and transparent. You know what is going on; he is not being deliberately obscure. Pynchon, he is the James Joyce of the previous century as far as being an influence. But Stephenson and Gibson have it as far as science fiction. The whole business of computer-oriented fantasy was created by Gibson in Neuromancer. The Wachowski brothers lifted all their stuff from The Matrix straight out of William Gibson.

IFP: In that vein, what about some movies you enjoy?

SH: Movies are very derivative, I have to say. The Matrix movies are very derivative, make no sense, but are delightful to look at.

James Cameron movies: he has a high track record. This new one, Avatar, should be interesting. They can do anything now in the movies.

One delightful movie is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Here’s another movie, The Rocketeer, from my friend Dave Stevens, bless his heart. That’s a beautiful movie. It has elements I have to love. My dad was in the Army Air Corps in World War II, so I grew up hearing about this stuff. I read all these flying stories, so I know they really captured the essence of flying beautifully. It even has Rondo Hatton in it. It’s a man in makeup, but the real Rondo Hatton was this obscure horror actor that had acromegaly, a disease which distorted his face. Hatton played parts in movies before he passed away in about 1949. Dave, he was fascinated by the most obscure and crazy stuff and they managed to include Rondo Hatton, courtesy of Rick Baker.

IFP: Let’s jump to something completely different. What artistic accomplishment are you most proud of?

SH: Apart from the paintings I really like, the private commissions – it’s the book that I wrote, The Lemurian Stone. I’m writing a sequel to that fantasy novel published in 1988. I have several books that I’m trying to push through to completion.

That was an incredible way to build a backlog of imagery because the way I write is to visualize the whole story and then describe the salient features of each scene. I’m not the first person who has ever done that, by any means. But all of the sudden, I had developed an entire mythology of imagery. So, I want to write, finish that sequel. I have a kick-ass story figured. I have to get it written or I will die of frustration.

I want to do some more sculptures. And there is a couple of other fun projects, like finishing up this model from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. When I was a kid, I loved building models. Now, I have all these models that I don’t have time to finish and I want to get that done. That’s an interesting way of illustrating an entire genre with a bit of sculpture. Because, lets face it, the ideas of Jules Verne are much more imaginative than his actual writing, which is pretty bad. Robert Heinlein supposedly learned French because he suspected it was all in the bad translation. It wasn’t. Lovecraft, if I do sculptures, between the portrait bust and the statuette of Call of Cthulhu, that is, in effect, illustrating the whole genre by doing it indirectly. And indirectly is the way Lovecraft described his monsters. Those kind of projects are the ones that I’m absolutely fascinated with.

IFP: You have been a judge and workshop instructor for Illustrators of the Future. Can you tell me a little about that experience?

SH: It’s interesting, because the people that I work with, my fellow judges and workshop people on both the illustrating side and the writer’s side, are top-notch people that I love to be around. Larry Niven on the writer’s side. Tim Powers and Serena Powers. Ron and Val Lindahn. So many great people. I do it because I love being around these people.

Also, the events themselves are coordinated beautifully. My friend, Bob Daley, he does the voice for a lot of the narrated stories and he does the god-voice for the event. Phillip Proctor is delightful and he does a lot of voice work for them. It was a professional experience. It’s great to be around people who know what they are doing.

Ron and Val also got someone else who does brilliant digital covers to do lectures. That was why I was over there (in California) in August, visiting. And I got in touch with some people on Facebook, a genius sculpture named Jordu Schell. When I was in high school, I wanted to be a makeup artist. I didn’t want to be an illustrator. So, I made latex masks and makeup work for our high school drama class, and I wandered into illustration. I know a lot about the technical procedures for makeup. Anyway, I hung out with Jordu Schell at his studio. When I was at IlluxCon recently, he did a sculpture illustration with a mad genius named Thomas Scott Kuebler. These two guys were cracking on each other for two solid hours, and they are great sculptors, funny and brilliant. That was a rare treat.

Also, I have to mention when I was in Los Angeles with the Illustrators of the Future, I had a chance to see the collection of science fiction and fantasy memorabilia at Bob Burns’ house and it is awesome. James Cameron stores a lot of his FX props with Bob. He has the drop-ship from Alien. He has at least one of the alien heads lined up. He has the original Robbie the Robot head. The original time machine from the MGM production with a mannequin, it actually works, it spins around, lights go on and off. He has a diver’s helmet from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He has the original submarine model used in the movie. That’s one of the most beautiful bits of fantasy sculpture ever designed.

Bio: Stephen Hickman has illustrated more than 400 book covers for major speculative fiction authors, including: Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, Anne McCaffrey, and Larry Niven. Stephen illustrated the cover of Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu from Baen Books and created a Cthulhu statuette based on this cover. He has also written a novel, The Lemurian Stone.

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