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Some of my earlier works - most unpublished - from 1998 and 1999:
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**FOR MORE RECENT ART, CLICK HERE**
I am often asked how I began my career as a sci-fi artist. To be honest, I've been doing artwork all my life. I started out scribbling drawings watching old Star Trek and Lost in Space. When I was small, one of the coolest books in existence was The Star Trek Concordance by Bjo Trimble. Bjo has compiled plotlines and cast lists from each of the 79 episodes (79, that is, not counting the pilot and counting the two-part episode as two). But, more than that, she had compiled a dictionary of every planet, every type of raygun, every alien race, every spaceship ever mentioned on the show. What Bjo had done for Star Trek, I - as an overly ambitious twelve-year-old - wanted to do for every science fiction movie or TV show ever created, ever. So, while other people were sitting in the theater watching Star Wars, amazed by all the special effects and action, I was taking notes as fast as I could. (Mind you, this was decades before they came out with the Essential Guide to Star Wars Aliens and books like that.) When I watched old Lost in Space episodes, I was re-drawing the derelict spaceships and bubble-headed robots as quickly as I could.
I studied every old sci-fi movie I could get my hands on. And those visions of George Pal's Martian war machines devastating Los Angeles, or a space ark gliding across the frozen surface of a new planet, or insectoid Selenites and the Moon Calf under the crystalline lunar surface - these images from ancient movies burned themselves into my consciousness. Later I would take lots of art classes, lots and lots of art classes, and I would refine my techniques in acrylic, marker and oil. But it was those early images that stayed with me, and, in a way, still propel the visions I paint today.
On this page, I am featuring some of my earlier works, from 1998 and 1999. I had long since finished my art classes, and taken a detour into the science world... In May 1988, when I started grad school (a Ph.D. program in bacterial genetics), I put down my paintbrush and I really thought I would never pick it up again. But art called me back. It always does. An art professor from University of Bridgeport, Paul Vasquez, told me, "Frank, you may find that you're really good at a lot of different things, but you'll never be really happy unless you're doing art." Those words haunted me when they were spoken fifteen years ago, and they haunt me to this day. In 1998, after having done almost no art for a decade, I decided to take up my paintbrush again. I also had the new tool of PhotoShop, wherein I could refine and polish my visions - a wonderful tool which didn't exist when I had last seriously done art. So I revived my art career, with the goals of winning the Illustrators of the Future contest, and getting my artwork in magazines and books. A lot of that has happened now, and I am naturally pleased, but I feel like I still have a lot of images left to make and things to say that can only be said through art, science fiction art.
**FOR MORE RECENT ART, CLICK HERE**
To set your computer to automatically bring up a new Frank Wu image every 6 seconds, click here. (Only works well with high-speed connections.)
Email me; tell me which piece you like the most. To see photos of me with various luminaries of the sci-fi world, click here.
Images (c) 1998-2001 Frank Wu
ILLUSTRATION CONTEST GRAND PRIZE WINNER!
Site established 9/3/98. Additions constantly.
Images (c) 1998-2001 Frank Wu