Long Story Short ★ JAMES GURNEY

How this Artist UNEARTHED his TALENT through SELF-GUIDED LEARNING

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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?