Michael Whelan, ‘Chanur’s Homecoming’ (1986)

 American artist Michael Whelan (born 1950) was inducted into ‘The Science Fiction Hall of Fame’ in June 2009, the first living artist so honoured. His Hall of Fame citation describes him as ‘one of the most important contemporary science fiction and fantasy artists, and certainly the most popular. His work was a dominant force in the transition of genre book covers away from the surrealism introduced in the 1950s and 1960s back to realism.’ In demand, copiously productive, Whelan has produced a deal of work for DAW books, and much for other imprints too: SF, Fantasy and Horror. His run of awards is particularly impressive: he won the Hugo for Best Professional Artist in seven consecutive years—1980 to 1986—and only didn’t win again in 1987 because he declined the nomination (he subsequently won the same award six further times, also receiving the 1988 Best Nonfiction Hugo award for his compilation, Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder). Whelan has also won many Locus Awards, Chesley Awards, World Fantasy Awards and Spectrum Awards.

Whelan has identified this image, produced as cover-art for C J Cherryh’s 1986 novel Chanur’s Homecoming, as his ‘all-time favourite’ among his own creations: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed the book,’ he reports on his blog, ‘and the experience of bringing to life the characters and themes of the beloved Chanur series’.

The book art, cluttered with over-large lettering and curtailing the spaciousness of the original, does not capture the particular excellence of Whelan's canvas. The image illustrates a scene from late in the novel: the crew of the spaceship The Pride of Chanur, captained by the titular Pyanfar Chanur, have just arrived at the docks of Gaohn, Meetpoint; they are walking out into a battle—you can see the scorching on the walls, and the constellation of blast-points on the far wall by the arch. Most of the crew are leonine ‘han’ aliens, like Chanur herself—at the front—but there is also one (simian) ‘mahe’ alien, and a hooded ‘kif’ alien, pointing, as well as one human. The human is Tully, who has escaped captivity aboard a kif spaceship—the kif captured the human ship and tortured its crew to discover more about this, to them, new species; Tully alone survived—and has found refuge aboard han ship The Pride of Chanur, captained by Pyanfar Chanur. The han only permit females to crew spacecraft, but Tully persuades Chanur to make him part of her crew. The single kif is called Skukkuk, and has been seconded to Chanur’s crew. In the background, behind a forcefield, are methane-breathing aliens.

The appeal of this image has something to do with the way a fine-brush hyper-realism is applied to the fantastical humanoid beast-creatures that are the subject of this collective portrait: it renders them as if they actually exist, and does so in a way unhindered by the need to apply prosthetics and make-up to fundamentally human actors, who thereby remain fundamentally human-looking, as was the pre-CGI practice in the other visual arts of SF TV and film. Chaur herself is a slightly unsettling combination of genuine lion-ness, and a buffed and sculpted human physique, and Whelan’s kif, Skukkuk, is creepily inhuman in his hooded dark-grey, like a figure of alien Death. He is pointing the way, and Chanur’s loyal han crewwomen crowd behind their leader, ready to launch forward. In a clever visual touch, Whelan has one of the han, and more noticeably the human Tully, looking out of the canvas directly at the viewer, breaking the fourth-wall. 

This is striking, and one of several elements in the art that Whelan has adapted from the classics of Western Art: in this case, from Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656; in the Museo del Prado in Madrid).

That great canvas portrays a kind of reverse perspective: ‘we’, looking at it, stand where the King and Queen of Spain would be, as they are having their portrait painted by Velázquez himself (the actual pair is reflected in the mirror on the back wall). The image, with the back of Velázquez’s canvas as its left-side margin, shows the painter looking out at us, and the five-year-old princess, or Infanta, Margaret Theresa, accompanied by her entourage of maids of honour, her chaperone, her bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Most of the figures in the painting are involved in their in-world interactions, but the artist and one of the dwarfs looks, boldly, straight at us. It messes with the line of representation, illusion and reality, foregrounds the artificiality of art by, paradoxically, including something ‘real’ that art does not, an acknowledgement of its artifice. (This artistic trick, of a face looking directly at us, has been copied by many artists since, but Velázquez began it).

In Velázquez’s painting the illusion-breaking has a point, since the topic of the artwork is, precisely, the creation of an artwork, the artist’s gaze and its mediation, to the gaze of the viewer, via the artwork. In Whelan’s image it is more adventitious: there is no reason why Tully should catch our eye with his, the way he does—which is to say, no in-novel reason, for Cherryh’s writing style is uninterested in metatextuality, artistic self-awareness or experimentation: she writes a foursquare, traditional, descriptive prose, delivering most of her narrative via dialogue, the suspension of disbelief grounded in an earnest ‘this is my worldbuilding, these are my characters, here’s all the busy business they get up to’ writing style. But in the cover-art Whelan generates for this unexceptional piece of writing, the fourth-wall-break of this out-image look achieves a wonderful frisson. It’s as if the artwork itself is saying: look at this exquisite verisimilitude of technique, applied to this unreal fantasy of lion-men and ape-men and aliens—I am aware of its artifice, and that you are admiring its artifice. We exist in a special intimacy, you and I: the SF unrealism of my world represented and the reality of you, the viewer and reader, looking in on it.

The image is also, formally, compositionally, very well made. In this I think it also Velázquezian: Las Meninas is framed but its actual rectangular frame, but within that there are other inner framing lines: the canvas on the left, the window frame on the right, by the rightward wall and the low ceiling, and then by the two large canvases, both squarely framed, hanging on the far wall, and below them other paintings, the mirror and the gleaming rectangle of the open door. Las Meninas is, in one sense, about framing, about how we cut-off and delimit what we see, and the possibilities of superseding and penetrating past such framing. In its way, Whelan’s Chanur’s Homecoming does something similar: the image itself frames its central group with its actual rectangular dimensions, then underscores that framing with in-image frames: the upward diagonal of the spaceship’s offramp, down which the crew are coming; the diagonal-to-vertical line of the body of the ship in the image’s top right, the architectural buttresses curving to support the port’s roof, and the various tiled insets. Then there is a gleaming mauve rectangle (like the door in Las Meninas), through which we can see the methane-breathing aliens, who cannot share space with the oxygen-breathing crew of the Pride of Chanur. It is cleverly put together, and Whelan deftly positions his elements to maximise their visual impact: putting the noble profile of Chanur, looking to the left, such that it is backed by the dark-grey and black form of the kif’s cloak and body, throwing the former into sharp relief—and then, in reverse, the paling of the background to misty white to make the ape-like head of the mahe character.

Another intertext from classic art is, I think, David’s Le Serment des Horaces (1784). Whelan shares David’s neoclassical photo-precision of technique and brushwork, and there is a similar dynamism to the composition. But more, Whelan shares David’s compression of perspective in his group-work. Given the space mapped out by the tiles of David’s floor, it’s not easy to see how the three Horatii, swearing their oath, can coexist in space: they must be squeezed really tight up against one another, David’s way of stressing their unity of purpose and singleness of patriotic vision. Whelan does something similar with the crush of han, pressed into a mass of lion-y bodies. That, the gesture (mirror-reverse, and consolidated into the one figure in Whelan), the arches in the background, and the vividness speak to significant influence. Whelan's image benefits from being disposed, as we would nowadays say, in portrait not landscape mode (like David's): the verticality of the image, reaching up into the high arched ceiling of the space-dock, gives the whole a high-reach and spacious openness, as the protagonists, in their alien variety, step forward into adventure.