-By Dan dos Santos

I was recently asked by Lauren Panepinto to contribute a piece to an upcoming exhibit she is curating, called ‘Dream Covers‘.

Each artist in the show is depicting an alternative cover to their favorite novel. For mine, I chose Frank Herbert’s Dune.

There are a ton of wonderful scenes in Dune that I would absolutely love to paint. But the job at hand was specifically a cover, and that’s no easy task. To me, a cover needs to capture the essence of the story as a whole, not just a particular scene or character. I find that’s especially difficult when a story holds a lot of significance to a person. It’s hard to set aside all those wonderful individual moments for the sake of the whole.

As a painting… I don’t think I quite captured everything it is I love about Dune. But then again, I don’t think I could.

For me, taking the time to really contemplate my favorite story again, examine it’s themes again, and try to find some new personal meaning in it… that really was the best part of this whole painting.