Frank Herbert
Children of Dune
Painted after Clyde Caldwell
- 55 plates
- Clyde Caldwell
The book
The emperor's twin children are born already carrying every ancestor's memory, and grow up hunted by their own aunt and by the possibility of becoming the wrong ancestor. One of them walks into the desert and comes back wearing a skin of sandtrout, which buys him four thousand years and costs him being human.
Why Clyde Caldwell
The obvious hand for Dune is John Schoenherr. He illustrated the original Analog serialisation in 1963 and painted the covers that fixed how a generation saw Arrakis — Herbert himself said Schoenherr's sandworm was exactly the one in his head.
We could not use him. Building an atelier means assembling a corpus of an artist's work, and doing that with Schoenherr would have meant scraping an estate that has a living heir and no public licence. The right move there is to ask, not to take, and asking is a slower conversation than this project was ready to have.
Clyde Caldwell comes from the same painted-paperback school — the fully rendered figure against a landscape, saturated and unembarrassed, that ran through science-fiction and fantasy covers from the seventies into the nineties. His weights were acquired properly rather than trained here, which makes this the only borrowed hand in the library and worth saying out loud.
What to look for
Children who are not childlike. The steering states age and bearing on every plate with the twins, because the default rendering of 'child' undoes the entire premise of the book.
