James Gurney, the dinosaurs are coming!

On Sunday we were due our monthly Barnes and Noble fix. I have a prescribed route I take in the store. First, what's new in the cheap stuff in the lobby, then past the books in the main aisle. If it is the usual browsing mission then to the art books and finally to the magazine stand to peruse the newest periodicals. After scavenging knowledge on subjects from cinema  to Google hacks, I'm picking up a few and heading to the coffee shop where the odor of Starbucks blends with that of printers ink for that most intoxicating of aromas. With my decaf mocha I'll enjoy my latest  issue of my favorite publication with my mate. And there are always new discoveries. Enter James Gurney.

Gurney is most well known for his Dinotopia books which are illustrated stories from an imaginative land inhabited by dinosaurs and people. His work from concept to execution is fantastic. The style is like that of the twentieth century illustrators, Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell. But I like to find out more about these people who introduce us to the fantastic. Where do they come from? What is their training? What inspires them?

from Fire and Ice

James Gurney was born in 1958 and grew up in Palo Alto, California. His father was a mechanical engineer and he was the youngest of five children. Much like me he liked to tinker and build things as a boy. He studied archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley, but received a BA in Anthropology in 1979. He then studied illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California for a couple of semesters. After a cross-country trip, he and Thomas Kinkade (aka, The Painter of Light) coauthored The Artist’s Guide to Sketching in 1982. Gurney and Kinkade also worked as painters of background scenes for the animated film Fire and Ice, co-produced by Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta. Frezetta was a well know painter of fantasy magazine covers. Gurney produced many magazine covers for the science fiction and fantasy publications. National Geographic Magazine was a client, and he produced a series of illustrations of dinosaurs for U.S. postage stamps. In 1992 he published Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time which became a best seller. Later he produced sequels to the book. His paintings have the quality of the classical illustrators with unerring accuracy to detail as seen in the video below. Notice that his medium is oil usually applied in transparent layers. The anatomical accuracy of the animals and the technical accuracies of mechanical objects is unbelievable. Although, I'm not quite sure how you would ascertain the accuracy of mythical beasts and fictional mechanical objects. He currently lives in Rhinebeck, New York, and continues to produce great art along with books on art instruction as well and maintains two websites and a blog.

Additional information:

• http://www.jamesgurney.com/
• Dinotopia
• Gurney Journey blog