2023 Hugo artist categories

[psocoptera]

Fan Artist continues to frustrate me by leaning so heavily towards artists who do work for fanzines and convention programs; I continue to wish for some sort of category reform. It's been pointed out to me that that day might come sooner if we let Fan Artist get nuked by the 25% rule, but I believe people are also actively working on getting rid of the 25% rule before it eats Fanzine, Fancast, or Fan Writer (see here), a proposal which seems likely to make faster progress than any pressure-driven reform of Fan Artist.

Anyways, here are this year's finalists, my ranking under the cut.

Best Fan Artist

Iain Clark
Richard Man
Laya Rose
Alison Scott
España Sheriff
Orion Smith



1 - Laya Rose. Her art is so gorgeous and makes me want to read the ones I haven't read.
2 - Richard Man. This ongoing portrait series seems like a genuinely interesting project.
3 - honestly I just don't care between the rest of them, sorry to anyone who was hoping for a full ranking.


Best Professional Artist

Sija Hong
Kuri Huang
Paul Lewin
Alyssa Winans
Jian Zhang
Enzhe Zhao

I nominated Hong, Huang, Lewin, and Winans, beating out Novella for the category in which I have the most nominations on the final ballot. Zhao and Zhang's stuff is also very cool, these are going to be hard to rank.



1 - Sija Hong
2 - Kuri Huang
3 - Jian Zhang
4 - Alyssa Winans
5 - Paul Lewin
6 - Enzhe Zhao

I'm torn between 5 and 6 - Lewin's work is so cool, but there's only one in the packet, so is the stuff I've seen mostly older than 2022? Zhao's stuff is also good, and maybe he's more currently active. Honestly this is the rare category where literally any of these six people could win and I would be excited.

Comments

[elysdir]

I had no idea that there was a proposal to eliminate the 25% rule! Thank you for the link—I’m glad to see that proposal.

(…And I wish I had seen it back when it was posted, because I feel like half the people who argued against it in that thread had failed to read the proposal, and/or didn’t understand how the rule works.)

(…And after I wrote that paragraph, I went on to spend about three hours reading the minutes of last year’s WSFS Business Meeting, in which all sorts of things happened that I hadn’t heard about. Fascinating. Looks like they voted to remove the 25% rule, but that change will still need to be ratified this year.)