When I first met Donato Giancola I thought to myself, "I've got some competition!" I was a freshman at Syracuse University in 1989 when I attended my first meeting of Comics Plus, the comic book club there. Donato was also new to the group as he had just transferred into painting from electrical engineering in Vermont. When everyone shared their sketchbooks and I saw Donato's work, I was blown away. Already present in his images was an understanding of compositional structure and an impressive comprehension of light and form. I was still more impressed when I learned that Donato was relatively new to art, having considered the field seriously for only a couple years previous. Present in even this early work was the drive, discipline and talent to become the successful painter he is. I have watched him develop, in tandem with myself, from an art student at Syracuse University into an accomplished artist at the top of his field. Over the years, I've watched as he pored over old, dusty library texts and visited museums seeking out techniques from the great masters. I would visit Donato in his studio and talk to him about his newest influence as he applied one more thin glaze of oil onto his most recent piece. This striving toward creative perfection has persisted from college into his professional career and has been instrumental in his rocketing success. As a fantasy and science-fiction painter, Donato is a kind of oddball. Traditionally, artists of the genre cite Frazetta and Boris as major influences, both of whom are regarded as contemporary masters of fantasy. While respecting these and other artists, Donato draws inspiration primarily from the much older masters of representational and abstract art. As he has said to me over many a pizza and Coke, "Why not build on the successes of the past?" The past Donato looks to includes Hans Memling, a brilliant painter of the Northern Renaissance tradition who emphasized an intricate patterning of detail, symbolism and saturated color in his realistic paintings. The iconic structure and carefully selected imagery in the paintings of this period act as the major driving force in Donato's art. Islamic art, elaborate and complex in its abstract two-dimensional structure, has also served as an inspiration to his design and composition. The observant viewer can also see such influences as Jan Vermeer, one of the Dutch Masters renowned for his subtle use of light, William Bougereau, to whom Donato attributes his understanding of skin tones and textures, and Caravaggio, who helped bring domestic subject matter into the limelight of high-art narrative picture making. When Donato needs to express an emotion through a figure, he will do so with a subtle yet loaded gesture: a smirk, or a gentle turn of the hip that gives his characters life and dimensionality. His work is grounded in an artistic legacy of realism and simple beauty which makes even his most fantastic creatures convincingly real. The more recent past which has strongly influenced Donato's creations can be found in the movie theaters and comic-book stores. Donato's imagination (as well as the imaginations of most of his generation) was captured by Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, and E.T., among others. Like many of us in the field, he learned to draw from the best of comic book illustrators (for example, John Byrne in Fantastic Four, Sal Buscema in Conan the Barbarian, and Walt Simonson in Thor) and spent hours drawing his own characters, which were often inspired by his role-playing in Dungeons and Dragons and the literature of J.R.R. Tolkien. But what really brings Donato's painting to life is his love of science. He has often spoken to me, voice full of wonder, of being awakened to watch astronauts land on the moon when he was a child and of the eerily beautiful northern lights (aurora borealis) visible from northern Vermont, where he grew up. He strives to bring a scientifically accurate observation to his art. Donato credits direct observation of nature, for example the reflection on a chrome ball or the glow of flesh in front of a fire, as his biggest tool in creating the seeming otherworldliness of his paintings. Donato is an artist's artist. When he approaches a painting, he is just as interested in whether the finished painting stands up as its own object than he is in the reproduced image. When you see an original Donato, the textures and luminosity of the paint and the strength of the overall composition come through, characteristics that are often lost when a piece is photographed and printed on paper. His techniques are masterful in their execution, and his devotion to his work is unparalleled. His draftsmanship is executed with the utmost attention and love for fine rendering and painstaking detail. Donato's work ethic and creativity are an inspiration to those around him. I am honored to call him friend as well as colleague.

-Steve Ellis is a professional comic book penciler whose clients include Marvel and DC Comics.

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