This business of writing about Michael Whelan isn’t all that easy—particularly since Don Maitz and David Cherry and others have all done such a great job of it. But I’ve been thinking, and I believe I’ve figured out his secret—I know how Michael paints the pictures that he does. But the answer is too simple to help anyone paint like he does or to provide enough words here to be useful.

Ready for the revelation?

Okay — he has artistic vision, and he works hard. Trite but true.

Isn’t that simple enough to be infuriating? You can tell about the vision, though, the most crucial part of any art—the way his acrylic and oil (and the occasional watercolor) pictures are not always easy to distinguish from each other except they’re distinctly his. And more importantly, from the pictures that he comes up with on his own for his line of prints.

• • •

"See, a lota guys can do assignments—you know, you tell ’em what to paint, we’ll do such-and-such a scene a certain way, and they’re all right. But you sit down and tell ’em, hey, paint anything you want, do what you want to, and right there a guy without his own personal sense of direction, artistically, finds himself outside the envelope. Some guys won’t know what to do on their own, and so consequently, you’re looking very very sorry."

— Gen. Charles E. Yeager

• • •

"He strove, and he worked hard hours at the easel. There was real effort there, reaching for those ideas. Picture after picture, each a new living thing.

Sometimes the ideas appeared from nowhere. Most he sweated for, to some extent. Sometimes, though, the idea was elusive, appearing perversely after a painting based on almost the right idea has been finished. He would swear.

Then he would pick up the phone and call the publisher for the time to do it over."

— Ernest Hemingway

• • •

"Reaching for a star, he has caught the moon. Reaching for the universe, he has caught a star."

— Lao Tzu

• • •

"And if these flown images, these avian notions have taken wing on winds wilder than ever blew through the infernal imaginings of a Dante, or of the sere zephyrs whistling through the bleak dolmens of Virgil the Gaul, outstripping the breath-catching rush of the high Southern latitudes before the antipodean tempest, or the heated simoom of locust-fed prophets; East, I say, to the uttermost of beyond, to that windless Nirvana where dwell the Enlightened of the East—why, there we might find that luminous abode of his inspiration, where his spirit strolls in sleep as these sublimities flock about his brow like a coronal of sea-birds; wild avian notions, I say, tamed to the brow of the artist, that some may follow with him back to the more restless airs of waking life, there to perch beside their workaday, more mundane fellows: sublime though they be in their own fashion as is all of Nature’s handiwork, as though sublimity were Her watermark—yet without the lucent memories of their more traveled kindred."

— Herman Melville

• • •

"Anyway, that’s how he happens to find himself lurking in the bushes outside this suburban studio, researching a bit in his new book, the SF artist (not sci-fi, jeers from trimmed beards) character in it, trying to remember what he’s been told or gleaned from more mind-numbing hours on the Net...

He peers carefully over the white sill into the studio, there he is, sure enough, standing near some bookshelves like maybe he’s thinking up another of those weird pictures but looking disappointingly normal. From the shelves, what seems to be fourteen rocket-shaped chrome hood ornaments on bases reflect distorted, elongated images of him as though of Whelan travelling close to light-speed in twelve alternate 1950s ideas of Life in the Future.

Nothing here, duck down (Eider?) nervously around the corner, already twitchy at being away from Manhattan for several hours—where’s the trash bin, the journalists friend, the Grand Turk mother-lode of hoped-for quirks and personality flaws. So far, this guy’s almost unusable as a literary character. Aha! there’s the promising Rubbermaid, discrete sounds as the rubber lid is removed, Rubbermaid the toast of the National Press Club—rummage, rummage,—not drugs, this guy doesn’t even smoke (faintly disappointed in spite of the promptings of that instinct that he’s learned to trust over his years of scrivening, which is warning him that this Whelan gets his ideas the hard way)... too true, the dumpster is Delphic, but he keeps rummaging nevertheless, hoping for some empty dropper-bottles of herbal tinctures to give at least a marginal tangibility to the as-yet unrealized artist/character. He pauses briefly over a coffee-stained pamphlet for a Rev. Dodge, and is about to throw it aside when... wait... oh, my stars and little comets! Something about that face clicks in, looking Sargeant-like past the outward appearance of the Rev. Dodge to the soul within, and by all that’s wonderful, it’s Whelan himself! Here are hidden fires indeed—what pictures can Whelan get up to Jekyll-like on misty evenings in his Rev. Dodge alter-ego? This is more like it. Continues rummaging as a scenario of the editorial offices of Vanity Fair unrolls automatically before his mind’s eye (Put a call through to Rhinebeck and try to get Annie Liebowitz on the line, ‘Hi, Annie, Lisa ... yes ... yes ... no, ha, ha! ... Well, you remember the space artist project we were talking over, well, get over to Connecticut when you have the an opening, he’s turned out to have some endearing eccentricities that we might be able to hang a story on after all ... right, the yellow suit is out unless the Talking Heads have a hit single in the next six weeks ... come on, it should be a snap, not like that paranoid Pynchon we tried to do in ’92 ...’) PARANOID! My god, at the very appearance of himself and the word paranoid in this reverie, virtual lattices of paranoia are emitted from him to the farthest reaches of the multiverse. He knows then that if he is ever fated to appear in wraith form before an unrepentant Ebenezer Scrooge, it won’t be as a pontificating Dickensian moral-reinforcing spectre, but something out of an Einstein nightmare (sandwiched in between disapproving images of darned socks and misplaced correspondence comes the thunderous voice of Jahweh crashing over land and sea, ‘Niner-Abelener the hard way, little Isness needs more dark matter!’), no; this spirit radiates it’s fetters and shackles in all directions until it looks like a cosmic Christmas ornament made by the infant Creator in some Akashic activities class, all styrofoam soul and glitter-covered toothpicks of paranoia.

Replacing the lid thoughtfully, he walks away whistling tunelessly between his teeth. He’s almost sure there’s nothing here he can use, except maybe as a ‘control-normal’ foil to contrast his more idiosyncratic creations against, when before his eyes right there on the sidewalk a vision of all the possible alternate-universe Whelans appears to either side of the actual Michael Whelan, as if standing already in a Worldcon hotel bathroom, reflected in the infinity of opposing mirrors—well, sure, if there’s not a volunteer in this crowd, he’ll start writing copy for Beanie Babies..."