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Artist James C. Christensen sounds pleasantly surprised and a wee bit disconcerted when I tell him what I've turned up about him on the Internet. He's clearly pleased to hear there's a growing following for his works of high fantasy -- colorful, lushly detailed, and, often, wryly humorous paintings of imaginary beings based on ancient fairy tales and classical mythology. But it's just a little weird to learn that people are whispering about you in cyberspace, even if what they're saying are good things. "I haven't been on the Internet yet," Christensen confesses. In fact, he says, there isn't even a computer in his office at Brigham Young University, where he is a professor of art. "It's not so much that I'm afraid of the technology," Christensen adds, "I'm afraid of its seductions. I'm too busy right now to spend my time on the Internet."
Busy indeed. Christensen is a charming, enthusiastic man, a seemingly natural storyteller who claims to get bored easily and who peppers his conversation with words like "fun" and "wow." Less than a year away from retirement from teaching, he is full of travel plans and painting projects and has just completed three years of intensive work on his second book, The Voyage of the Basset, an extravagant, mythological adventure story with nearly 120 illustrations, many of them reproductions of his elaborate and weirdly beautiful paintings.
The idea for The Voyage of the Basset, Christensen recalls, came to him while he was watching a public television documentary series on Charles Darwin and the voyage of the HMS Beagle. "I wrote in my sketchbook that Darwin had missed a lot of stuff. What if someone sailed in the other direction? There was no narrative at that point. Just the idea that a professor had gone in the other direction to pick up all the things that Charlie had missed -- the sea serpents and mermaids and manticores and dragons. It was a reason to put all this mythology together in a painting."
Of course it wasn't long before Christensen, whose earliest memory is of lying in front of the radio with piece of typing paper and a box of crayons drawing the action in the story he was listening to, turned that painting into a story. "I'd go in to work on it and rather than have these mythological figures just sit there, I would give them activities. I would start to build stories." Not only that, he began to tell those stories to the people who issue limited edition prints of his paintings. They encouraged him to write the stories down, they put him in touch with writers Renwick St. James and Alan Dean Foster who would help him shape and polish the stories, and, eventually, they made him an offer of support he couldn't refuse. That initial painting evolved into the book and, Christensen concludes, "The rest, as they say, is . . . "
Well, not history, exactly. More like an antidote to history, or at least to the unimaginative parade of facts that is often offered up as history -- or science for that matter. For The Voyage of the Basset concerns the fantastic travels of Professor Algernon Aisling, a recent widower, and his two daughters, nine-year-old Cassandra (who like her mythological namesake is often ignored) and her older sister, the skeptical Miranda. As the story opens (in London sometime in the mid-nineteenth century) Aisling, a professor of mythology, is in an emotional trough because his colleague, the pompous Professor Bilgewallow, has told him that these old stories are useless and the modern university will soon do away with teachers of such unverifiable nonsense. At this low moment, walking along the Thames one April evening, the family encounters the HMS Basset and its odd crew of dwarves and top-hatted gremlins. There the adventure begins.
Christensen intends Voyage to please readers ranging from eight to 80. "I like to have layers in my work. The paintings in the book have little meanings that are under the surface. I'm happy if someone looks at a painting and says 'Boy, it's beautifully painted and it makes me smile.' But I like it even more if a person says, 'Gee, I can see three layers deep and I identify with the message you are alluding to.' The story works that way too. It's written in chapters designed to be nice one-night reads. There are layers of meaning in it, but it's also a darn good yarn. I have a granddaughter who is about two, and I'm really anxious for her to be about four so I can read it aloud and try it out on her."
Chief among the messages of the book is the importance and validity of one's own imagination. The Basset voyagers sail under the banner "Credendo Vides," which means not "seeing is believing" but "believing is seeing." "It's the core of the whole thing," Christensen says with a certain cheerful fervency. And I get the distinct impression this passion derives from lessons learned early in his career.
"When I was in school at UCLA," he recalls, 'illustration' was a nasty word. You were either an artist or you were an illustrator. My classmates and teachers and much of the art world were extolling Rothko, Matisse, Pollack and slash and dash, while I was locking myself in the bathroom with Durer -- and feeling terribly guilty about it. Finally I got be thirtysomething and decided 'Hey, I am not part of this. I'm not going to end up in New York, I have no desire to play the game, but I love making these pictures. My heart beats faster when I see a pre-Raphaelite painting or a Flemish master. That's what I resonate to. Why don't I just enjoy that, even if no one pays any attention to me.
"That was when I launched off into my own. I'd been doing these fantasy paintings for years -- but only for myself. Meanwhile I was doing anything for a buck out there in the world -- illustration, design, editing, teaching. A few friends saw my work, loved the stuff, and thought other people would too. So, tentatively, I stuck it out there, and by darn it was snatched up."
"So," Christensen says, "credendo vides is about the importance of the imagination, of thinking creatively and of believing that the doors aren't closed to much of anything, if we let our minds go. Too many of us lock ourselves off from this. Science doesn't have the answer to everything. Sometimes we need to rely on the human spirit and our own faith and belief. That's what the book says -- I hope with a certain amount of fun and humor."
And that, I suspect, may be the real reason why James Christensen's studio in Orem, Utah, is filled with paintings and painting paraphernalia and lined with bookshelves and rows of skulls ("I have a fascination with skulls; I have 50 or 60 of them."), but doesn't have a single modem or monitor or ISDN connection to the Internet.
Alden Mudge is a freelance writer in Oakland, California.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.