Poyser, Victoria
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Artist.
Earlier name of the American artist now known as Victoria Lisi (1949- ), and the name used for her sf art. The former wife of sf fan Kennedy "Kippy" Poyser (1945-2009), she married artist Julius Lisi in 1987 and then went by Victoria Poyser-Lisi or Victoria (Poyser) Lisi before adopting her current name. She received a BFA from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and although she has attributed her interest in sf art to her attendance at the World Fantasy Convention in 1979, she had already been credited in 1978 with some interior art for Galaxy and the Fanzine Weirdbook. After additional work for fanzines and some interior art for the 1980 Ace Books edition of H Beam Piper's The Fuzzy Papers (omni 1977), she earned Hugo awards as Best Fan Artist in 1981 and 1982; she then moved to New York to seek professional assignments.
Poyser's first three book covers – for Piers Anthony's Double Exposure (omni 1982), L Sprague de Camp's The Prisoner of Zhamanak (1982), and a 1982 edition of Mark Clifton's Eight Keys to Eden (1960) – all foregrounded softly rendered naked men and/or women. Although some of her later covers also had this delicate aura of soft pornography in the manner of Margaret Brundage, like her cover for Jack Lovejoy's The Second Kingdom (1984), her work seemed more impressive when her subjects kept their clothes on: her cover for Tanith Lee's Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sister Grimmer (coll 1983), for example, interestingly foregrounds an adult Red Riding Hood, sitting in a snowy forest as an ethereal wolf's head hovers above her. As the above titles indicate, Poyser tended to specialize in Fantasy, though she did do covers for a 1983 edition of Spider Robinson's and Jeanne Robinson's Stardance (1979), showing a female astronaut in an implausibly form-fitting spacesuit, and for a 1984 edition of Anne McCaffrey's The Harper Hall of Pern (omni 1979), wherein a woman strums a lute while surrounded by tiny fire lizards. After she married Lisi, she began working collaboratively with her husband, and her focus shifted away from book covers toward illustrating children's books and exhibiting works of fine art. She also served as a part-time instructor for Colorado's Aims Community College, and in 2010 she published an instructional book, Vibrant Children's Portraits: Painting Beautiful Hair and Skin Tones with Oils (graph 2010). [GW]
see also: Frank R Paul Award; Rowena Morrill.
Victoria Poyser Lisi
born 26 November 1949
works
- Vibrant Children's Portraits: Painting Beautiful Hair and Skin Tones with Oils (Cincinnati, Ohio: North Light Books, 2010) as by Victoria Lisi [nonfiction: graph: instructional art book including the author's paintings: pb/Victoria Poyser]
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