When I look at Frank Frazetta’s The Sorcerer, I’m reminded not of medieval alchemy or forbidden incantations, but of the kitchen tables of my youth. I'm reminded of Magic: The Gathering games played with friends in middle and high school. The flickering firelight in Frazetta’s painting feels like the same energy that burned in those long afternoons when we, too, were sorcerers.
In Magic, we conjured creatures, cast spells, and countered each other’s enchantments in a battle of intellect and imagination. We carried our cards everywhere — to school, to church, to each other’s homes — bound in rubber bands and packed like relics in our backpacks. Laying them out on a friend’s table was its own small ceremony. We traded, debated, and experimented with endless combinations of color and power. My decks were usually blue: the color of illusion and intellect, of control through subtlety. I loved the enchantments, the enduring spells that reshaped the battlefield slowly and methodically. There was art in that restraint, and satisfaction in building something that lasted beyond a single turn.
Looking back, those games were more than pastime, they were community. They taught us to imagine, to negotiate, to lose and forgive. They were a world we built together through shared rules and unspoken trust. Frazetta’s Sorcerer, with his raised hands and open book, embodies that same impulse: to summon something greater than oneself through ritual and collaboration. The monster he faces could be fear, uncertainty, or simply the raw energy of creation. What mattered was that he dared to call it forth.
Frazetta’s influence runs deep through the world of fantasy art and gaming. Long before Magic or Dungeons & Dragons, he gave form to our collective dreams of adventure. He created a language of dark towers, enchanted blades, and the eternal struggle between light and shadow. His work created a shared aesthetic imagination, one that still echoes in every illustrated card and rulebook. Each game, in its own way, is a continuation of that same act of summoning: calling a world into being, if only for the span of an afternoon.
What strikes me now, as a teacher, is how rare those moments have become. In a time before phones, we gathered in person to play. We sat for hours, talking, laughing, teasing, arguing, and when tempers flared, making up again. Those sessions were formative in ways I could not have understood then. They taught patience, empathy, and resilience. They taught us lessons that live on far beyond the game table.
Today, in my classroom, I try to create those same spaces of play. We keep decks of cards, dominos, and chess sets on hand. Between assignments, I’ll see students challenge each other across the table — sometimes tentative, sometimes fierce — but always engaged. I join them when I can, not just to play, but to share in that ancient ritual of human connection. There’s a kind of quiet beauty in it: the sound of shuffling cards, the clack of dominoes, the murmured laughter that fills the room.
Play, I’ve come to believe, is not a distraction from learning but one of its purest forms. It is through play that we learn to imagine, to strategize, to empathize. Through play we learn to be human. Games remind us that creativity is communal, that meaning is made together.
In Frazetta’s Sorcerer, the act of summoning becomes a metaphor for that same process. Each of us, in our own way, stands before the fire, calling forth imagination and daring to shape it. Whether it’s in a fantasy painting, a deck of cards, or a classroom full of students, the magic is not in the spell itself. The magic is in the gathering, the shared belief that something wondrous can happen if we only sit down together and play.