Moon Sits Smoking His Pipe - illustration for Whirlwind is a Ghost Dancing

Leo and Diane Dillon

A very rare, original illustration for Natalia Maree Belting's 1974 book, Whirlwind is a Ghost Dancing, a book of prose by the author written in relation to Indigenous North American mythology. The book was illustrated by the award-winning husband and wife artists Leo and Diane Dillon. This is an original pochoir illustration done for the book, executed on vellum using pastel and gouache, which was then cut out into two elements that were collaged one atop the other onto an illustration board. It is for the passage that tells an imagined Thompson River Salish tribe (Nlak'pamux) myth about the moon. Nlak'pamux are a tribe of Canada’s southern British Columbia province and northern Washington. The accompanying text, on page 16, reads:

"Moon sits smoking his pipe./Night after clear night he sits smoking,/ And the clouds are the smoke from his pipe./ When rain is coming, or snow,/He lays out a hoop around himself,/A circle of frozen smoke,/Builds a house for himself on its frame,/Sits in the doorway smoking,/Until the snow begins, or the rain."

Leo and Diane Dillon were an award-winning, husband-and-wife team of illustrators, famous for their covers for science fiction and fantasy books in the 1970s and 1980s. They were also prolific children's book illustrators and authors. The artists broke barriers in the American illustration world, with Leo being the first Black man to win a Caldecott Medal and Diane the first woman – and the only until 2014 - to receive a Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist. They met at the Parsons School of Design in the mid 1950s, where they were rival illustrators for a year before falling in love and marrying in 1957. Their joint career spanned over 50 years before Leo’s death in 2012; Diane Dillon continues to work as an illustrator in New York.