"There have been many different artists that have been inspirational. I suppose the question is directed to what was the reason why I went into fantasy illustration"
About this Quote
Vallejo’s sentence has the guarded politeness of someone who’s answered the same question a thousand times and learned that “inspiration” is a trap. He starts by widening the frame: many artists, many influences, no neat origin story. It’s a subtle refusal of the interviewer’s preferred mythology, the one where a single genius moment explains a whole career. By the time he lands on “I suppose,” he’s already signaling that the real issue isn’t who he admired, but why the work took the particular form it did.
That pivot matters because fantasy illustration has long been treated as a suspect genre: commercially entangled, associated with paperback racks, role-playing manuals, and a certain adolescent intensity. Vallejo’s phrasing reads like boundary-setting. He’s not denying influence; he’s insisting on motive. “Directed” hints at how external the question feels, as if the label “fantasy illustrator” is something applied to him rather than chosen with full ideological commitment.
The subtext: don’t reduce a practice to a list of influences when the more revealing answer is about appetite, market reality, and personal temperament. Vallejo came up in an era when illustrators often navigated between “fine art” prestige and the paycheck work that actually circulated widely. Fantasy was one of the few spaces that let virtuoso anatomy, dramatic lighting, and maximalist imagination be the point rather than the problem. His sentence is a quiet reframe: the story isn’t whom he borrowed from; it’s why this world made sense to build.
That pivot matters because fantasy illustration has long been treated as a suspect genre: commercially entangled, associated with paperback racks, role-playing manuals, and a certain adolescent intensity. Vallejo’s phrasing reads like boundary-setting. He’s not denying influence; he’s insisting on motive. “Directed” hints at how external the question feels, as if the label “fantasy illustrator” is something applied to him rather than chosen with full ideological commitment.
The subtext: don’t reduce a practice to a list of influences when the more revealing answer is about appetite, market reality, and personal temperament. Vallejo came up in an era when illustrators often navigated between “fine art” prestige and the paycheck work that actually circulated widely. Fantasy was one of the few spaces that let virtuoso anatomy, dramatic lighting, and maximalist imagination be the point rather than the problem. His sentence is a quiet reframe: the story isn’t whom he borrowed from; it’s why this world made sense to build.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Boris
Add to List
