Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art

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“Once you’ve become used to all the luxuries of digital

painting, it’s hard to imagine giving them up.”

Avi Katz showed his promise early as a fantasy artist. When

he was still a teenager in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, two

families on his street paid top dollar for his babysitting

services because he could draw images for the kids from

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. After a while, Katz sent

a stack of the drawings off to Tolkien. He received an

enthusiastic response from the author, who told him he

was the rst illustrator to portray the dwarves as Tolkien

had intended. However, Tolkien also told him that his

elves were all wrong.

Undaunted, Katz continued the art studies he’d begun at age

twelve when, encouraged by a mother who had attended art

school, he applied for a model-drawing class at the Fleisher

Art Memorial school, and overcame the teacher’s reser-

vations that he was too young to draw nudes. In 1967, he

enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley and

studied painting with photorealist Paul Sarkisian. As Katz

puts it, “I was swept up in the sex-drugs-treason-rock

music excitement of that unique time and place.”

To avoid the U.S. draft and Vietnam War, he transferred

to the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem—

where his sister was studying—to nish his art degree. But

he encountered opposition there to his interest in doing

traditional gurative artwork. While some of his teachers,

including Joseph Hirsch, Avraham Ofek, and John Byle,

encouraged him, abstract art was in vogue, and most of

the school’s professors were unsympathetic to his goals.

Captive. Watercolor/airbrush/colored pencil.

Tamara. Watercolor/airbrush/colored pencil. The artist created a series of por-

traits of biblical heroines based upon the Hebrew word for a female foreigner

or alien, nochria. He depicted them literally as aliens from outer space. Katz

called the series Alien Corn, a reference to Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA/Tel Aviv, Israel

AVI KATZ

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page 36 MASTERS of SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASY ART

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Tamara. Watercolor/airbrush/colored pencil. The artist created a series of por-

traits of biblical heroines based upon the Hebrew word for a female foreigner

or alien, nochria. He depicted them literally as aliens from outer space. Katz

called the series Alien Corn, a reference to Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.

Dragons Wrede. Pencil/pen/digital. Katz found inspiration for his dragons from

illustrations by Maxfield Parrish and Kenneth Grahame. He devised complicated

color-relationship charts to make the color schemes different but related among

the illustrations, and painted the figures light on a dark background, aiming

for a classical feel. He sampled the background texture of leaves from reference

photos online.

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