John Schoenherr

 
American artist John Schoenherr (1935-2010) began producing SF art in the latter 1950s, working for a variety of magazines: Amazing, Fantastic and Infinity Science Fiction and especially Astounding/Analog, where he created 75 covers and many hundreds of black-and-white interior illustrations. He also worked for paperback publishers, including Ace Books and Pyramid. His most famous work is undoubtedly the art he created for Frank Herbert's Dune stories in Analog (1963-1965), and then for later book editions. Notable art on its own terms, these visualisations have also exerted considerable influence on later visualisations of Herbert’s imaginary universe, by other artists, in video games and movies. Frank Herbert said ‘I can envision no more perfect visual representation of my Dune world than John Schoenherr's careful and accurate illustrations.’ [The Illustrated Dune (Berkley Windhover, 1978): cover above]. Here is the cover for the initial instalment of Dune, published December 1963, under its original title, ‘Dune World’ in Analog:

The desert landscape is given a sense of scale and grandeur by the two little running figures, and its two moons show that it is an alien world. Compositionally it is very striking, the upthrust spar of rock against, the tilt of the foreground, as if the land is in upheaval, an Earthquake (or Dunequake), the encroaching sandstorm in the sky, the hurrying hunman figures: it is all dynamic, full of energy and motion, despite being, in essence, a piece of landscape art. For the first book edition of the complete novel, now renamed Dune, Schoenherr again portrayed the landscape of Herbert's imagined world.

The composition is again a strong combination of verticals and diagonals, and he again generates a sense of sublimity and scale with the inclusion of human figures dwarfed by the landscape. But what is interesting here is the varying textures of the rock Schoenherr is able to work into the image: a tangle of lines and almost vein-like ridges, sand-weathered stone surfaces, almost tangible in their roughness.

Schoenherr's style in his colour work has been called ‘Impressionistic’, but it is not quite as softly defined or hazy as that: he worked in egg tempera, an old-fashioned medium, nowadays supplanted by oil paints and acrylics, and very unusual in a professional artist of the twentieth-century: pigments mixed with egg-yolk and diluted. It is a medium that dries much faster than oils, and requires more rapid brushwork, paint being applied in thin, semi-transparent layers that build up to a pastel-like smoothness. Because it cannot be applied in thick layers in the way oils can be, tempera paintings tend not to have deep colour saturation of oil paintings, but the graceful liveliness and textural detail of Schoenherr’s compositions are remarkable.

In this, his cover for October 1962's Analog (illustrating Theodore L Thomas's story ‘The Weather Man’) the skin-tones on the gigantic hand could almost be pastels. The image is of a godlike hand reaching into Earth's atmosphere and stirring a tornado out of the clouds; but it resembles devotional art, when Christ tells Doubting Thomas to put his finger into the wound in his side and prove its reality.

For his black and white illustrations Schoenherr worked dry-brush method on scratchboard, adding extra details by pen (scratchboard is card coated with a layer of white china clay, and then with a layer of black india ink: the artist scratches lines into this outer layer revealing the white beneath, in effect drawing with white lines on black rather than inking black lines onto white paper. The result mimics traditional woodcut, but is much cheaper and faster to produce). Schoenherr wasn’t the only artist to use scratchboard—Ed Emschwiller also produced a lot of illustrations in this medium—but his command of line and the solidity of his sense of shape is extraordinary. Here, from the original Analog serialisation of Dune, are ‘Paul, surprised by a Hunter-Seeker’ and ‘Ornithopter’:

Remarkable are the bold manner in which the hood worn by the foreground character is indicated entirely by its white absence brings the composition into potent relief; the sculptural and, again, textural qualities of the dark face, the bird-themed flying craft (reimagined as giant-dragonfly-themed flying craft for Denis Villeneuve's blockbuster film versions, yet still called ‘Ornithopters’ rather than ‘Anisopters’); scale again indicated by a small standing figure; and the efficiency of the way the lands and sky behind are sketched.

By the end of the 1960s John Schoenherr grew dissatisfied with being seen only as a science-fiction artist: most of the work in the field was, he said, fourth rate. He worked for other publishers, and produced a great many finely-observed animal paintings and drawings, being tempted back to SF only on occasion, often for more work on Herbert’s Dune series. At the head of this post is one of his images of an Arrakisian sandworm: brown, rather smooth-skinned, trefoil mouth. Here, in an illustration of the climax of the first novel, three such sandworms charge the Imperial Sardaukar troops, scattering them.

This isn't impressionism, so much as it is reminiscent of J M Turner's proto-impressionist studies in swirling brown, gold and light, something like ‘Rain, Steam and Speed: the Great Western Railway’ (1844). Schoenherr again conjures enormousness out of his gaping sandworms with the leaning foreground and the many tiny human figures, but more striking is the sandpaper-rough textures of the stormy air.

Schoenherr is good at figures and faces, and can work representational imagery deftly, but with these canvases he approaches something closer to abstraction: the great arched ovals of the worms' mouths, the upward sloping line of sunlit sand below, echoed by the upward sloping line of dust in the air above, the scattered dots of human figures. Or here, where a spice factory is swallowed by a worm, seen from above: a striking composition of serrated circularity: