| A Conversation With Don Dixon | ||||||||||||||
| An interview with David Maddox | ||||||||||||||
| May 2004 | ||||||||||||||
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Artist Don Dixon has been creating professional space and science-fiction related artwork for over 20 years. His works have graced the covers of The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, OMNI, Smithsonian World, Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, Scientific American, over 60 novel covers and even design concepts for Epcott Center and Caesar's Palace. He also serves as the Art Director for the world famous Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California. His work can be viewed at www.cosmographica.com. What was your first inspiration that got you on the road to painting? 
Painting in particular or my weird genre?
As a child I used to spend summers at my grandfather's house in New Jersey. They were out in the countryside so you could see
stars at night which was always fascinating to me. By then I was always asking questions. There was one occasion when I was riding
in the back of my grandfather's Studebaker and I saw a meteor and I had no idea what it was, I was 4 years old at the time, and
I said "Wow! What was that? A thing shot across the sky!" When we came back and I got out my crayons and I drew a picture of
it, my grandfather identified it, "That's a shooting star." So that was my first astronomical
rendering. Then I started reading science fiction and discovering the work of Chesley Bonestell, he was the grand-daddy of us all.
You know I don't actually remember. I do remember that I thought they were photographs and I was wondering "How could they
take such pictures?" When I got it into my head that they were paintings and that someone could paint that realistically, that
amazed me as much as the subject matter. That somebody could create a picture that could fool you into thinking it was a
photograph. So I laboriously tried to learn to
paint like Bonestell.
That started in 1983 or thereabouts. A friend of mine, Rick Sternbach, who for many years was a senior illustrator on
the Star Trek series, had been doing covers for some time and got a couple Hugo Awards for it and put me in
touch with Ballantine Books. The art director of Ballantine started sending me manuscripts to read and the first one was
John Brunner's The Crucible of Time.
How did I end up getting an honest job after twenty years of being a happy freelancer? Got married, had a baby and
got a mortgage. We decided it would be nice to know when at least one of the checks was going to come. So I've been here
ever since. When I'm not freelancing or spending 5 hours a day sleeping.
It actually forced me in some ways to learn the new technology because, up until five or six years ago, I was just a
painter and that's how I made all my pictures. But it became so obvious (at the Observatory) that in order to get a show out
on time I would have to go digital that it forced me to learn these tools. I'm glad of that because otherwise I would not be
competitive with anyone else. As it is, I can do revisions for magazines very quickly and all my commercial stuff is digital
now. I just paint for collectors.
Not much. A case in point... Warner books has bought the rights to Greg Benford's Galactic Center series
and they're repackaging and reissuing those. Benford asked them to use me for the covers. I've worked with Warner for a
long time, they're great people with a great art director, so for most of the new covers, there's been no problem, but it's
very easy to get typed. God knows I've done it to myself, you know -- I'm a space artist. We've done half a dozen of these
covers that have been space scenes and they actually have been scenes from the books but this current
one, Sailing Bright Eternity, doesn't really take place in space. It takes place inside this weird knot in space-time
that was created by an ancient intelligence which is a kind of artificial hollowed out universe. And I really wanted to do
a scene in there to accurately reflect the book but it has to go with the rest of the package so... it can be frustrating.
Oh yeah. It's terribly frustrating to not have a copy of a manuscript. That was the case
with the last two of the Red/Green/Blue Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. I had a partial
manuscript for Red Mars, that was enough to give me some sense of what was happening, some of the scenes in
the book. I had nothing for the last two, except the original author's outline which was very, very general and
suggestions from the art director.
It does vary, but the actual painting time, not counting time for turnaround on revisions,
editors to look at it. Typically I spend maybe 30 hours on a cover total. This may be spread over the course of several weeks, though.
For most publishers, the artist retains the copyright. The publisher will buy the rights to
use the painting on a specific edition. For a Warner book cover, they'll pay me for hardback rights then when
it comes out in paperback I'll get another fee. If a foreign publisher wants to do a translation and use that
artwork, I'll negotiate with them directly. So, for most clients, the artist gets to retain the copyright. Some, not
necessarily major book publishers but a lot of magazines, will commission a work for hire. Basically you do the job
and they take it and it's theirs forever. And as long as the fee is high enough and the artwork is sufficiently
specific to their use I don't feel the pain of not being able to resell it.
My favorite cover. My favorite? See the sad thing, is all I can see are the faults in everything I've done. Out
of literally hundreds of paintings there are maybe half a dozen I can look at and don't want to go and fix. I'd have
to say my favorite cover was for Charon's Ark. The premise of the story is that an airliner full of bright teenagers
is high-jacked by aliens and taken out to Pluto, which is actually a starship. Pluto and Charon were parked there, 65
million years ago by a remarkable coincidence, and Pluto
was terraformed and set up as a dinosaur preserve. So these kids are dumped on this planet and they have adventures
with dinosaurs. But there are interesting geometries involved because you have this terraformed world and then there's
Charon, their artificial sun. They even had an elevator that went up to it. I got to do dinosaurs, I got to do jungles
with people prowling around with weapons, futuristic technology, a natural landscape, interesting sky -- lots of different
elements that I rarely get to do were incorporated into that painting.
I don't have to do a whole lot of research these days. I read the manuscript, find a scene
or two that tickles my fancy and that I think the publishers may let me do. I've got enough
knowledge of basic astronomy already packed away that I don't have to go find out what Mars looks
like, for instance. I know all that stuff and most of the time there's nothing so specific in a novel
that I have to do research.
I've started reading the Alternate Histories by Harry Turtledove. They're great, I'm enjoying those. That's it, of late.
Recent to me would be Gattaca. I thought that was a good science fiction film and there
was nothing stupid in it. That's the main criterion for me in Science Fiction
films. Minority Report and Vanilla Sky were good also.
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