Artwork Details

Description

This was a very slim year for me but this pretty much takes the cake for me. I'm leaving the description on here for those that might not know what this is. The best way to explain what this painting is and represents, is to quote from the book "CONAN THE PHENOMENOM by Paul M. Sammon" This is from page 84. "THE FIRST BOOK-LENGTH CRITICAL STUDIES DEVOTED TO ROBERT E. HOWARD'S LIFE AND ART APPEARED IN THE 1970S AND 1980S. Some of these books, like Robert Weinberg's The Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard's Sword and Sorcery (1976,Starmont House), or Don Herron's The Dark Barbarian (1984 Wildside Press),are today seen as solid additions to Howardian scholarship. Others, like Darrell Schweitzer's Conan's World and Robert E. Howard (1978, The Milford Series: Popular Writers of Today), have been criticized for their inaccuracy and superficiality. However, the two best known book-length Howard studies are Glen Lord's The Last Celt: A Bio Bibliograghy of Robert Ervin Howard (1976, Donald M. Grant), and L. Sprague de Camp's Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E, Howard (1983, Blue Jay Books) The two books took dissimilar approaches to their subject and aroused wildly disparate emotions in their readers. The Last Celt is generally concidered the finer of the two works. Lord, the premier Howard fan, chose a respectable if eclectic approach to REH by dividing The Last Celt into four main sections- "Autobiography," "Biograghy," "Bibiograghy," and "Miscellanea." The first two sections include letters and autobiograghical sketches penned by Howard himself (The Wandering Years, "An autobiography," "On Reading-And Writing"),as well as reminiscences about REH by those who corresponded with or met him (H. P. Lovecraft's Robert Ervin Howard: A Memoriam," E. Hoffman Price's "A Memoriam of R. E. Howard"). Lord also included an extremely comprehensive bibliograghy, which list almost every Howard-related item that had appeared by 1976-including books, stories, comics, articles, poems, and letters. The Last Celt concludes with various ephemera, including extracts from REH's correspondence, two original, unpublished Conan story fragments ("The Hand of Nergal"and The Hall of the Dead") and even Howard's obituary notice. Dark Valley Destiny, on the other hand, is a more conventional (and more detailed) biograghy. Written by L. Sprague de Camp, his wife Catherine Crook de Camp, and Jane Whittington Griffin, Destiny is a heavily researched work that attempts to analyze Howard's fiction by examining his life. De Camp includes dozens of quotes from people who knew, read or worked with Howard, the result of many extensive interviews that de Camp conducted with citizens of Cross Plains, Texas who still remembered REH. Unfortunately, despite this plethora of information, The Dark Valley Destiny is marred by de Camp's incessant, heavy handed, and judgemental speculations on REH's character, as well as an all-pervasive sense of de Camp's own sense of moral superiority." The art itself comes in at a 16x24 oil on canvas board.