Born in the same year (indeed, within a few days of one another) on different US coasts, American artists Leo Dillon and Diane Sorber met at Parsons School of Design in New York City in 1954. Their collaboration became a relationship and, in 1957, a marriage, and decades of artistic production followed, for a variety of outets and publishers. In the 1990s Leo Dillon noted: ‘people often comment on the “Dillon style.” I think that someplace, the two of us made a pact with each other. We both decided that we would give up the essence of ourselves, that part that made the art each of us did our own. And I think that in doing that we opened the door to everything.’ They are particularly associated with award-winning cover-art for children’s literature. Their SF and Fantasy art is a major part of their oeuvre not least because they designed the covers of a number of classic genre titles. Above is their cover for the first edition of Harlan Ellison’s seminal collection Dangerous Visions (1967). The two artists have met the challenge of visually representing 33 very diverse and distinct stories by drawing out the ‘vision’ element of the title: a baroquely stylised basilis, feathers, claws, a serpent’s tail, a human face on its head and another embedded in its chest, occupies the left-hand field; arrow-lines representing beams of light convey this through the cornea and pupil of a bisected eyeball, appearing on the retina not up-down inverted (as would be the case in life) but mirrored and blurred. The bold green-black colour-scheme, and the sinuously internal frame-line by which the elements of the composition as all linked inside a bulbous, rather penile zone, give movement and fluidity to the whole. It an unsimple image that manages, by the tautness of its design, to achieve something direct and iconic.
That ‘Dillon style’ often combined elements rendered with simplified realism and more complex stylised elements, often intricately patterned areas. In this artwork for the Ace paperback first edition of John Brunner’s
The Traveler in Black (1971), a collection of linked Fantasy short-stories, the fgure of the titular magician is rendered in dynamic blockprint.
He is shown, in a stylised manner, altering and morph reality with his magical staff and innate powers (the Traveller's ‘has the power to bind and free elementals—which are varied and more than five in number—in his quest to reduce the power of Chaos, and thus the utility of magic, until everything should have a single nature. As he works, person after person, city after city, move from Chaos into the realm of Order, and thus from Eternity into Time’). This ‘reality’ is a complex tesselation of two-dimensional shapes and colours, somewhat in the manner of Paul Klee, squeezed into a more rudimentary and linear spectrum by the traveller's hands. The combination of the two styles, the figure as if from a screenprint poster, the Klee-like grid of patterned colours, is both complimentary and illuminating: the whole is cogent, memorable imagework.
For R A Lafferty's Nine Hundred Grandmothers Ace Books original (1970) The Dillons fit coloured elements, stained-glass-wise, around a white space that itself blocks-out a triple-breasted angel-woman. The coloured units jigsaw-combine in the eye to reveal a stylised, medieval dragon, and an individual clasping the female's legs and staring out of the composition at us with haunted eyes. Nine Hundred Grandmothers is another collection of short-fiction, and the Dillons here illustrate one of them: ‘Through Other Eyes’ (originally published 1960)—the purple face from just above the girl's head is thwarted Charles Cogsworth, who uses a special technology to see, as the story title say, through the eyes of others: when he sees through Valery's eyes, it is a revelation to him, the whole world around coming alive and metamorphosing, mundanity becoming glorious but also ordinariness becoming lubriciously carnal: “She can smell rain at a great distance and in a foul manner, and she wants to be in the middle of it. She worships every engine as a fire monster, and she hears sounds that I thought nobody could ever hear. Do you know what worms sound like inside the earth? They're devilish, and she would writhe and eat dirt with them. She can rest her hand on a guard rail, and it is an obscene act when she does it. There is a filthiness in every color and sound and shape and smell and feel.” The Dillons render this phantasmaogirc revisioning of the world non-mimetically, with clarity and vividness.
In a similar style, more stained-glass-like and considerably more nightmarish, is the cover they produced for the Ace original paperback edition of Michael Moorcock's schizoid space-voyage novel The Black Corridor (1969):
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