Science & Tech Quote by Boris Vallejo

Vallejo is drawing a hard line between fantasy as escapism and fantasy as engineering. The first sentence could be read as a mild, practical note about reference and research, but the subtext is a manifesto: imagination isn’t a substitute for mechanics. If you want to paint a machine convincingly, you need to understand its logic, not just its silhouette. That insistence on function reveals why his sci-fi imagery feels tactile rather than decorative. It’s also a quiet rebuke to a strain of illustration culture that treats tech as ornament - pipes, rivets, chrome - without consequences.

Then he pivots, almost dismissively, to “the romantics,” and the temperature changes. “The costumes bored me” isn’t a critique of history so much as a critique of a certain aesthetic agenda: period dress as automatic atmosphere, pre-packaged meaning. Vallejo’s work, famously saturated with hyper-ideal bodies and high-gloss spectacle, isn’t allergic to drama; it’s allergic to costume drama. Period clothing can become a museum label you’re forced to paint around, a cage of accuracy that doesn’t offer the same imaginative leverage as speculative design.

The context matters: Vallejo came up in the era when paperback covers and fantasy calendars were mass media, expected to deliver instant impact. Machines reward the kind of visual clarity that reproduces well: readable components, implied motion, believable weight. “Romantics” implies frills, fabric, and nostalgia - details that ask for patience and subtlety, the opposite of the punchy, airbrushed immediacy his market demanded. In two sentences, he defends a craft ethos and a commercial aesthetic, while admitting, bluntly, what bores him.