Art and hope: D. & D. Palumbo

Yesterday I went to a Magic: The Gathering tournament with friends. It was decent. A friend and I registered for some 2v2 matches and faired alright. We ended up winning enough cards to build at least one new deck each, and half those cards were from the yet-to-be-released expansion Conflux.

My favorite event of the day, though, was that an artist for the game had a table set up along the side of the rather sizable hall in which everyone was playing. In between games, I wandered over there, steeling myself to avoid eye contact with a starving artist, whose art couldn’t be at all impressive, and whose personality would more than likely be tantamount to Incremental Blight.

I was awed by what I saw.

Artwork for the Deft Duelist card

He had prints of the artwork for many different cards laid out, beside the originals he’d created.

Artwork for the Obelisk of Bant card

I was quite happy to meet the guy, and asked the politest questions I could without resorting to small talk, wanting to know more about how the industry functioned, but never press him to admit where he actually stood in it.

What I quickly noticed, however, was that he signed all his works “D. Palumbo.” I found this a cute coincidence, being vaguely familiar with the work of one Dr. Don Palumbo, namely his Chaos Theory, Asimov’s Foundations and Robots, Herbert’s Dune: The Fractal Aesthetic of Epic Science Fiction. After brief deliberation as to whether I should bother to mention the similarity, I decided that I would, as he was clearly a geek, and therefore likely to appreciate a science fictiony association with his name, obnoxiously obscure though the reference may be.

The artist Dave. Palumbo is Don Palumbo’s son. He says he has never in all his life had someone recognize him because of his father. He said he didn’t think anyone had even read his father’s book, and guessed his father felt the same.

I owe this chance recognition to professor Dr. Don Riggs, with whom I’ve taken many science fiction literature courses, and who is a good friend of Dr. Don Palumbo. So good, in fact, that Dr. Riggs posed for a tarot card which Dave illustrated:

Artwork for The Hermit tarot card

If that isn’t Dr. Riggs in the truest sense, I’ll eat my hat.

So, please, do yourself the favor of checking out Dave Palumbo’s site and browsing his works. I happily purchased a print of the art for the Deft Duelist, and he was happy to autograph it for me.

The fact that art of this caliber still exists is a monumental reassurance to me that, as I’ve long suspected, everything is indeed OK in the world. The fact that I came across it in natural pursuit of two loves, science fiction and Magic, tells me that I’ll be happy all my days.