Ed Emshwiller, who commonly went by the nickname "Emsh", died on this date in 1990. I've only really studied his work in the past few years, but that's made me realize the man and his art are both worth knowing more about. He was an early illustrator of Conan, as well as Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. I plan on doing a "Savage Swords of" post devoted to Emsh at some point in the future, but today I think an overview of his life and work is more appropriate.

Emshwiller spent his first fifteen years in Lansing, Michigan. Then, his family moved to Richmond, Virginia in 1940. As soon as Ed graduated his junior year in high school, he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army and soon found himself serving with the 351st Infantry Division in northern Italy.

After the war, Emsh went back to Michigan and studied art in Ann Arbor. Upon graduation, he and his wife settled on Long Island. Emshwiller immediately began to get work in various magazines and digests. While his SFF art from that period is better-known, Ed also got work doing covers for mystery pulps and men's adventure mags.

In terms of sheer volume, Emshwiller's output from 1951 to 1966 is pretty staggering. Check out his ISFDB entry here to see what I mean.

When I first began taking a serious look at Emsh's body of work, I thought I had a fairly good idea of what his style was like. I was wrong. There is no "typical" Emsh cover. Ed was always trying something new. One could say that, roughly, Emsh's art fell on a continuum with Jack Gaughan at one end and Kelly Freas on the other. That covers a lot of territory, Gentle Readers. On the "might as well be Gaughan" end, there is no better example than Ed's classic cover for the Lancer edition of The Dying Earth and on the "Freas" end is something like his painting for the February, 1957 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

A glance at Emshwiller's ISFDB entry reveals that his frenetic pace became a crawl after 1964. That's because he found a new artistic outlet: film. Emsh became a highly regarded experimental filmmaker--apparently Hitchcock and Kubrick both admired his work--and was one of the foremost pioneers in computer video animation. In 1979, he moved out to California, where he founded the CalArts Computer Animation Lab and served as dean of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of Arts until his death in 1990.

Soldier, husband, father, painter, filmmaker. Ed Emshwiller lived a full and worthy life. Raise your mead-horns high in memory of the man called Emsh, sword-brothers.

Feel free to click on the carousel art gallery below to check out more of Emsh’s classic work. Ed was no slouch when it came to painting beautiful women, by the way.