A fairly recent photo of Don Maitz. Limner of wizards, dragons and swashbucklers of many stripes.

I've been wandering up and down in the world just a bit since last I posted. Things have settled enough for me to give due honor to the great Don Maitz, who celebrated his seventieth birthday about a week ago. I have a lot of catching up to do and I'll start with Don.

Having achieved his threescore and ten, Don Maitz stands tall as one of the true Grand Old Men of SFF/weird art. A substantial list of his professional work can be found here. An in-depth biography can be found at Don's website here. For those who don't like hyperlinks, here's a brief bio from the Illustration History website:

Throughout his forty-year [almost fifty-year, at this point] career in fantasy and science fiction illustration, Don Maitz (b.1953) has worked on a variety of projects. He has produced scores of illustrated covers for books by numerous celebrated authors, including Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, Stephen King, and more. When Captain Morgan Spiced Rum launched in 1982, the company commissioned Maitz to create the iconic image of Captain Morgan.

His artwork has been showcased in the books First Maitz: Selected Works by Don Maitz (1988) and Dreamquests: The Art of Don Maitz (1993). The Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists has honored him with ten Chesley Awards, and the World Science Fiction Society has given Maitz two Hugo Awards for Best Professional Artist.

I'll add a bit to that, having interacted somewhat with the man on social media. Maitz was deeply influenced by the artists of the Brandywine School--Pyle, Wyeth and others--as well as contemporaries like Maxfield Parrish and Arthur Rackham. However, if I had to succinctly describe his style during my favorite period--1976 to 1986--I would say it was on a spectrum from Kelly Freas to Jeffrey Jones with some of the best stuff halfway in the middle.

As I recall, I first encountered Maitz’s art on the cover of Brian Stableford’s The City of the Sun. The image leapt out at me from the book-rack. There was an aura of menace and true weirdness coming off of it. The colors were hyper-saturated. The cover glowed, almost as if someone took Parrish, Freas and Frazetta and put them in a psychedelic blender, I would later learn that figures backlit by a glowing background were a recurring motif in Maitz’s paintings.

Being a DAW edition, the artist was listed as a matter of course. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for this ‘Maitz’ guy. Don’s paintings graced many of my favorite books from that period, especially the covers for Keith Taylor’s ‘Bard’ series. However, I noticed Maitz shifting to a more ‘slick’ style with Bard III: The Wild Sea. Scrolling through ISDB’s chronological list, I think I can narrow Maitz’s ‘break’ with his old style as occurring between Lloyd Alexander’s The High King and Brian Stableford’s The Last Days of the Edge of the World in mid-1985.

The change was inevitable. As Morgan Holmes has noted, there was an ‘extinction event’ around 1980 that ended the careers of many 1960s/1970s artists. Art directors at the big publishing houses wanted art with a more ‘photo-realistic’ feel—think Boris Vallejo. The fact that Maitz was able to soldier on with his old style five years after the ‘new order’ was imposed is a testament to his sheer talent and professionalism.

While I was never as big a fan of Don’s new style, he was/is still better than almost anyone else out there today. His mastery of color and light was and is undiminished. I kept track of his career over the past three decades as he became a specialist in dragons, wizards and pirates. I can see nothing wrong with any of that. We need more of all three.

My only regret is that Don has never done a cover for a Clark Ashton Smith or Robert E. Howard collection. Maitz has painted covers for a Jack Vance novel or two, but I’d love to see his take on the Dying Earth and Lyonesse.

Time runs short tonight. Feel free to peruse the gallery of Maitz art below.

Happy (belated) birthday, Don!