Long Story Short ★ JAMES GURNEY
How this Artist UNEARTHED his TALENT through SELF-GUIDED LEARNING
There are few living artists or illustrators whose work have such strong roots in science and classical education as our guest today. JAMES GURNEY is one of those rare specimens who has the skill to make you understand process and the ability to apply that process for the pure pleasure of storytelling. Whether it’s a single illustration or a longer work of the imagination, James has famously through his blog and books supported a generation of creatives, to dig deeper into history and themselves to become better at their craft. Join me as we talk with one of my favorite working illustrators today.
BTP: I find one’s environment shapes a person. You grew up in California but then settled in the Hudson Valley between Albany and New York City. How have those two locations shaped you as an artist and as a person?
GURNEY: Yeah, I suppose I was blessed to start my life in a peculiar suburbia. Suburbia was uniform and standardized. That fostered my imagination and my inner life.
BTP: It’s interesting. The absence of input can make us hungrier for some kind of stimulation. It can be a real forcing function. What was so peculiar about the suburbia you started off in?
GURNEY: It was Palo Alto in the 1960s and '70s. Around me, the foundations were being laid for computers, the Internet, and AI. Those were mostly outside my conscious awareness, but I picked up on the creative ethos. Palo Alto exemplified original, divergent thinking. Even the school teachers wanted to be challenged intellectually. I spent my college years majoring in archaeology at University of California, Berkeley. Then I headed to Los Angeles to figure out how to draw and paint and make a living at art. In those years I met my wife; we were sketching buddies; I dropped out of art school; she stayed in; we got married; and we moved east to start our family in a small town in the Hudson Valley. Experiencing that four-season climate for the first time was like a second childhood for me.
BTP: Growing up with four seasons, I guess I can appreciate having had the experience and yet, thankful that I only now deal with 9 months of rain and 3 months of sun. Still, if you could travel anywhere in time to anyplace in time to document a people and their culture, when and where would you go?
GURNEY: May I suggest three places? And let's assume I could comprehend the language and be a purely invisible eye. The first would be the Sumerian city of Uruk around 2100 BC when they came up with the epic of Gilgamesh. I would be curious to see how those amazing stories related to the culture. The second place would be Etruria (Italy) 700 BCE. I had the privilege to travel to the Etruscan part of Italy in the 1980s on assignment with National Geographic Magazine (published June 1988). There are so many lost arts and mysteries about the language. The last place I'd love to document would be North Sentinel Island right now. It's one of the last places on earth where people haven't been touched directly by modern life, and I wonder how they would interpret the flotsam that washes up on the beach and the airplanes that fly over.
BTP: I’ve heard a few people having landed on the North Sentinel Island only to meet a quick demise. It reminds me of the film The God’s Must Be Crazy...though with far dire consequences. Speaking of gods, one of my favorite early book covers you did is for REALM OF THE GODS. You talked about the process a few years back. You made it sound so simple, so easy.
GURNEY: Well, thanks. The truth is that if I liked the manuscript, it was easy, and I probably did a better cover. That's why I did my best covers for novels by Alan Dean Foster, Tim Powers, Catherine Cooke and James Blaylock.
BTP: It’s important to always do your best work despite what lands in one’s lap, but nothing makes you do work you’re happiest about when you’re truly inspired by those you’re working with. It makes me wonder if there was ever a difficult job because of friction with an Art Director or the subject matter? How did you work through it?
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GURNEY: I always got along fine with the art directors in the paperback and magazine worlds. But there were a few job offers for album covers that I turned down because the subject matter just didn't fit my capacities. Learning when and how to say no is a skill I had to develop.
BTP: “No” is a powerful tool in a freelancer’s arsenal, one that people early in their career have a tough time with. As someone who more-or-less carved their own art path from an early age all the way through academia, UC Berkeley and two semesters of Art Center, how did you come by the business skills and presentation skills to launch a freelance career in book illustration? This is usually a struggle as even to this day these skills are not entirely taught in schools.
GURNEY: You're right: the business skills were not taught in most art schools back then and I don't know if they're taught now. I learned them the hard way—what my mom used to call the School of Hard Knocks. Sink or swim. I would even go to law libraries to try to understand contracts. The art of presentation was one thing they really taught well at the art school I went to.
BTP: With the self-discipline and rigor that you established early on for self-learning, how well has that served you as technology has become more of a driving factor, changing the course of art and how we communicate ideas?
GURNEY: I believe that all learning is self teaching, even for students enrolled in schools. I tried to model myself after my peers, the smart students that I met along the way during my time in school. Each of us figured out how to be motivated and fulfilled as we were learning and growing. Also, I'm a real proponent of project-based learning, meaning you figure out the skills you need to solve a given problem. This was 30 years before YouTube tutorials. So, for example, if I wanted to make a latex gorilla mask with separate resin jaws and fiberglass teeth, I had to figure out how to make a life cast of my face, how to mold latex, and how to work with epoxy resins when there were no books in the library about that.
BTP: I first saw your work in the pages of my grandfather’s National Geographic. You had the ability to pull the viewer into a world, even then, to imagine the story of each of the people in the illustration. Did your education and skill prepare you for working under the pressures of archaeologists who would inevitably provide feedback on the accuracy/inaccuracies of your work?
GURNEY: I like your question, but I would reframe it a little. The project archaeologists weren't just applying pressure for detail and accuracy. Instead, I felt as if they had the keys to the treasury! They're the ones with the best imaginations. They can look at a scrap of bone or mud or stone and visualize the whole lost world in front of their eyes. Archaeologists and paleontologists are like magicians or conjurers. That act of conjuring is what I tried to bring to Dinotopia.
BTP: Yes, that’s a much better way of putting it. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist or geologist, but my mother insisted there was no money it. She may have been right, but still, unearthing the past would have been pretty cool. What kinds of books, movies, and comics were you into as a kid?
GURNEY: As a kid, I was like an old man in a child's body. I loved old radio shows from the '40s and '50s like Escape and Suspense. I listened to a lot of Stan Freberg, Spike Jones, and Victor Borge. I was completely unaware of superhero comics, and didn't watch most TV shows and movies of my era. Once I became a teenager, I was obsessed with Warner Bros. cartoons, The Three Stooges, and Sesame Street. I didn't have a lot of friends, so I was in my own world.
BTP: Like you, I studied and was a voracious consumer of early 20th century illustration. Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, and J.C. Leyendecker were the artists I was first exposed to.
GURNEY: Those are exactly the artists I was looking at starting in middle school. All the classic names you mentioned would have been music to my young ears. My other lodestars were Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, and MC Escher. One of the joys of growing up before computers and the Internet was that it was like exploring a well-stocked storeroom in the pitch darkness, finding stuff at random that no one else knew about.
BTP: I honestly feel the art of searching and discovery is lost on the younger generations. I think the feeling that it took work to find something made that thing and the experience more meaningful in our lives. In terms of dinosaurs and archaeology, were you ever a huge fan of CHARLES R. KNIGHT, ZDENEK BURIAN, or VICTOR AMBRUS’s work?
GURNEY: I loved archaeology, but I wasn't a huge dinosaur or dino-art fan as a child. My parents did take me, the youngest of five kids, to the Natural History Museum. They pointed to an Allosaurus skeleton and said, "that's a dinosaur." OK, I thought, they're skeletons. So what? Haha.
BTP: Yeah, to compute what they looked like with flesh and muscle felt like a chasm of knowledge had been left unexplained. What came first for you, the archaeology or the art?
GURNEY: Definitely the art came first. I discovered dinosaurs around age 30. I quickly realized that they had evolved a lot from where they were when I first met up with them as a kid. There were already strong ideas bubbling up in the Paleo world. The dinosaurs were now regarded as intelligent, warm blooded, dynamic, parental, and feathered. Dinotopia picked up on the science that was emerging at the time, and I got a lot of support from research paleontologists.
BTP: And they embraced the fantastical elements as well?
GURNEY: Absolutely. They all grew up with science fiction.
BTP: How did you realize you could make a living doing art?
GURNEY: I started to realize that I could make a living with art, or at least with calligraphy, at age 14 when I started doing freelance lettering for wedding invitations. I would ride my bicycle to print shops and offer my services. That led to graphic design work doing paste up, logo design and then, later, illustration work.
BTP: In an interview with Stan Prokopenko and Marshall Vandruff you mentioned having traveled to meet John Berkey, and having met Tom Lovell, easily two of my favorite illustrators, one because Berkey’s work is so impressionistic and the other because Tom Lovell’s value control is unparalleled. What was your takeaway from each of them that informed your own approach to illustration?
GURNEY: Those were the two illustrators that I followed most avidly. I frankly modeled myself after them. I sought them out and met each of them briefly and then corresponded with them afterwards. I agree: Berkey's work had a "joy in paint" that that is quite rare. Lovell was a consummate craftsman in every department of picture-making. He brought entire scenes to life using the old-school Golden Age methods.
BTP: It’s hard enough as a freelance artist to keep the work coming in, but your wife Jeanette is an artist as well. Having carved out a life for your family in Rhinebeck, New York how difficult was it, pre-internet, to keep work coming in before Dinotopia had put you on the map?
GURNEY: It was hard at times. There were dry spells, but my wife and I both lived frugally and saved during the good years. I started out doing background paintings for an animated film. That job gave me enough of a nest egg to launch into freelance life. I started at the bottom of the barrel, getting paid very little to do really ambitious paintings. There was just enough work coming in to keep me busy until I came up with Dinotopia. There were tough periods when I had to pivot, like later in the '90s and the early '00s, when the first phase of Dinotopia wound down and the Internet geared up. I tried gallery work, but didn't like the idea of creating individual paintings that disappear into the oblivion of individual homes, and I was allergic to domains ruled by gatekeepers. When social media came along, I was pretty excited because I had always been trying to find a way to reach audiences directly and tell the stories behind the artwork.
BTP: Having produced a metric-ton of art in your lifetime as evidenced by your books, sketchbooks, and video tutorials, I’m always curious how people imagine how their life’s work will be managed after they're gone. My father-in-law was an artist who died over a decade ago put that in perspective for me. Have you thought about this at all and have any insights to share?
GURNEY: That's my next mountain to climb. Like many other artists I'm a bit of a pack rat. So I've started organizing things and discarding junk, and will be selling part of my book collection. I'll also resume offering some original sales via the auction market. Most of the Dinotopia art is framed and stored safely since it's been traveling around in museum exhibitions. I went through and curated a lot of my sketches and papers when I was assembling my art instruction books Imaginative Realism, Color and Light, and the remastered edition of The Artists Guide to Sketching. Now I'm deeply immersed in writing and designing my next book called Gouache in the Wild.
BTP: You know, I want to take a moment to acknowledge two of your books, IMAGINATIVE REALISM and COLOR AND LIGHT. Whether it was my own personal brain style or what, but they came to me at a time when I felt l wasn’t making the connection with painting from my imagination. Sure, I could make stuff up, but to also make it convincing? That took a layer of discipline that I don’t think I had enough guidance with. To incorporate science as well, was another powerful tool that helped show me all the considerations one needed to make when setting a scene. I know the books have been translated into dozens of languages. Compared to Dinotopia, how seminal have these two books been for you and those who’ve purchased them?
GURNEY: Thanks. Those books grew out of the blog Gurney Journey, which I started way back in 2007. I posted every day for sixteen years, which comes to more than 6,000 posts. It all started when the publisher of my book Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, encouraged me to start a blog, and I said, "What's a blog?" I had been keeping notebooks of my reading about the classic picture-making methods of the Golden Age illustrators and the academic painters of the late 19th century. You're right, making a made-up image look convincing takes a lot of steps, and that's what I cover in Imaginative Realism. With Color and Light, I continued downloading my brain of all the practical knowledge I had gleaned from practice and reading, not just the classic early stuff, but some of the new insights we've gleaned from modern neuroscience and visual perception research.
BTP: Was it any easier to get these books published because you'd proven yourself with Dinotopia and maybe to a lesser degree with The Artists Guide to Sketching?
GURNEY: Yes, the success of my previous books helped a lot with getting those books published. At first, I wasn't sure which publisher would be right for the art instruction books. I had I assumed when I first brought them around that I need a publisher with domain expertise in art instruction. I found such a publisher, and they wanted to publish the books. But I knew myself well enough to know that I needed to design the books as well as to write them, and that was much more important than the domain expertise. I realized that I had a unique advantage as a blogger because I had a strong connection with a very smart readership, and they acted as my expert editors for the content. I already knew what topics were interesting, controversial, or confusing. So I'm very happy with my publisher now at Andrews McMeel, and they do a brilliant job at production and distribution, which are definitely beyond my scope…
BTP: We want to thank you for joining us, James. We both have been a fan of your work and wished we could have had you in the FRAZETTA: Painting with Fire documentary. But I hope fans enjoy this conversation as much as we did.
GURNEY: Thank you for your interest. Your questions are unusually insightful. I saw your Frazetta documentary and enjoyed it. He was a fascinating person and an unusual talent. We'll have to talk sometime.
BTP: Lance and I would love to have you on the podcast anytime, James. You just tell us when. In the meantime, where can people find out more about you and your work?
GURNEY: People can reach me on the usual social media channels, such as Instagram, Twitter, Blue Sky, and Blogger. But I'm putting most of my effort into three outlets: Substack, YouTube, and printed books. The books you can get at my website jamesgurney.com.
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