SideBar Interview

Speaking of audio for the studio, Sidebar is a fun way to learn about the artists whose works you've been looking at. Dwight Clark and Swain Hunt do extended interviews with the likes of James Jean, Adam Hughes, Peter de Sève, Brad Holland, Paolo Rivera, Berni Wrightson, and a million others in their "Barchives".

Well, they had a slow day recently, and, having pretty much exhausted the A-list, they dug down to the bottom of the potato barrel and found me! So if you don't have anything else to do or you need something to amuse yourself while you clean brushes or cut mats, check out this link to the official Sidebar Gurney interview!.

Thanks, guys! You do a very thoughtful interview, and it's a real honor. Above, watercolor sketching in Yellowstone, photo by Mr. Fujimoto.

G.P. Tape Network

Spending long hours painting in our studios can be a lonely occupation. How can technology help to bridge the gap between one studio and another, and how does the technology shape the kind of ideas that people exchange?

Well, blogs, podcasts, Twitter, and Facebook help keep the conversation going on all sorts of art topics. But before the Internet, there wasn't much besides the phone for staying in touch. That's why in the late '70s and early '80s we invented the Golden Palm Tape Network, which was sort of the ancestor of this blog.

The way it worked is that you would record cassette tapes and send them around to each other by snail mail. You would leave some blank space at the end for other people to add their comments. People would initial the back to show they'd heard it. It would take months for any single tape to make the rounds.

The topics included art readings, live visits to art museums, amateur radio plays, and general discussion and healthy debate. The medium encouraged long, reflective ruminations, private thoughts, and thoughtful analysis.

The nucleus of the G.P Tape Network was a small group of us art buddies who knew each other at Art Center. We lived in the same apartment, a seedy dive called the Golden Palm. The artists involved included Paul Chadwick, Bryn Barnard, Thomas Kinkade, Ron Harris, Richard Hescox, and occasionally Tom Kidd, David Mattingly, James Warhola, and a few others who joined in later. All those people were (and are) brilliant and incisive and funny, and I owe who I am to what I learned from them.

There were hundreds of tapes, most of which were recorded over again with new stuff.

If I can find time, it might be fun to share some of these tapes online, especially the ones with our discussions of art. There's some fun stuff on there, and it reminds me how much communication technology has helped each of us to share our thoughts about art and to learn and grow.

Previously
Golden Palm (GP)
A visit to the Golden Palm

Bookplate Art

Bookplates are becoming an old-fashioned art form, I suppose, but I love them as much as I love books.

I have made two different bookplates for my own collection. The one on the right is the first one, made during high school. It’s the coat of arms of my ancestral Scottish clan, the Mackays. They were both drawn in scratchboard, my favorite medium in high school and college.


The cornucopia for image connoisseurs, called “Dark Roasted Blend,” has an inspiring collection of bookplate or “ex libris” art, some funny, some macabre, some poetic, some extravagant.

Kindred Spirits Location?

Asher B. Durand painted Kindred Spirits to memorialize his friend Thomas Cole and their beloved Catskill Mountains. In 2005 the painting sold for $35 million dollars to Walmart heiress Alice Walton.

What is the setting of the painting? Is it just an idealized composite, or an actual place? Landscape painter Scott Balfe sent me this picture of a place he discovered in a remote section of Kaaterskill Clove.

The picture shows Shelf-Rock at the Five Cascades under Haines Falls. “Bit of a hike to get down there,” he says. The rock sticks out 10-12 feet. “I know Durand must have seen that spot,” Scott told me.

“You can see South Mountain and Kaaterskill High Peak in the distance today, which resemble the shapes of the mountain forms in Kindred Spirits. I’m sure Durand’s painting was a composite, but once you’ve been down there, the impression is a strong and lasting one.”
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Previously:
I paint a portrait of Scott in a downpour
Painting a sheep farm with Scott

Dinotopia Opening Delayed

Due to the massive snowstorm bearing down on the mid-Atlantic states, the Delaware Art Museum has announced that it will be closed on Saturday.



The Dinotopia exhibition will open on Sunday instead. I’ll give the Sunday colored pencil workshop as planned, and slip away from 2:00-3:00 for the public lecture presentation, followed by a booksigning. The Museum will stay open an extra hour on Sunday, until 5:00, and I'll be signing books in front of the bookstore from 4-5.

Jeanette and I are driving down today. Hope to see you there on Sunday!
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UPDATE: SUNDAY MORNING, 6 AM. The Museum is scheduled to open to the public at noon, and it will stay open until 5:00, an hour later than usual. I'll give my presentation, "Fact and Fantasy: The Making of Dinotopia" at 2:00 in the auditorium. All are welcome.

WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS, you can come an hour early, at 11:00, and enter in the Studio entrance. The Delaware Art Museum's phone number is (302) 571-9590.

Sleeping Princess

Here's the Belgian filly Princess, a sketch I did nearly six months ago, July or so.

She's a big horse now, about the size of a standard riding horse. The farmer, Lenny, says she may end up bigger than her mom.

Here are those sketches from last spring when she was just two weeks old. The technique is water-soluble colored pencils and water-brushes, one of which was filled with dilute brown fountain pen ink.

FlipFlap Animation

Here's a cool new way to deliver animation. You kind of have to blur your eyes to see the continuity.

Hands

Three tips for drawing hands:
1. Look for the big outside shape first.
2. Try to establish a line of action: from the forearm, and the wrist through the palm and all the way through the fingertips.
3. When you can't find another subject to sketch, practice using your own hand as a model.

Upcoming Appearances

There are a lot of lecture/booksigning appearances coming up between this weekend and this coming Fall. Hope to meet you at one of them.


Sunday, February 7 Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE
Opening (Delayed from Saturday because of weather) of Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney
The Museum is scheduled to open to the public at noon, and it will stay open until 5:00, an hour later than usual. I'll give my presentation, "Fact and Fantasy: The Making of Dinotopia" at 2:00 in the auditorium, followed by booksigning. All are welcome.

Sunday, February 7 Delaware Art Museum
11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. – Studio Workshop: Water-Soluble Colored Pencils (Studio Wing)

Booksigning at the Delaware Museum Bookstore again on Sunday 4-5 pm.
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Tuesday, February 9
3:00 p.m. – University of the Arts, 320 S. Broad St., Philadelphia (contact the illustration department)

Tuesday through Thursday AM
Various elementary and middle schools

Thursday, February 11
12:35 – 2:00 p.m. – Delaware College of Art & Design, lecture at Auditorium of Delaware Historical Society; Open to public


Saturday, February 13
12:30 p.m. – Paleopalooza. Presentation at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, followed by booksigning. Entrance fee.

Thursday, March 4
6:20-9:00 p.m. – Fashion Institute of Technology Illustration graduate program, New York City.

Saturday, March 13
Time TBA – Lecture and booksigning at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA. Open to the public, fee charged.

Weekend of June 5 and 6
Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL, opening of Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney (June 5 through Sept. 14, 2010)

Week of June 13-18, 2010
Instructor, Illustration Master Class, Amherst, MA (Only 3 spots remaining)

Weekend of June 25-27
Guest of honor, Anthrocon, Pittsburgh, PA

Fall 2010 Tour
I’ll be touring this fall with the new book, Color and Light.

Here’s the tentative schedule:
Northern California, Oct. 3-10
Southern California, October 10-17
Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, October 25-November 10.

If your art school, animation studio, or game company might be interested in an artist visit, please have your events person contact me at jgurneyart (at) yahoo.

Note to Museums: The Dinotopia exhibit is available for 2011 bookings. Please contact me or Mary at the Norman Rockwell Museum’s Traveling Exhibition Office.
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Photos by Didier Frontini. Merci beaucoup!

Cave Exploration

In 1992, when I was researching the cave sequence of Dinotopia: The World Beneath, I traveled to the central mountains of Puerto Rico, where you can find some extensive limestone caverns that are safe to explore as long as it hasn’t been raining recently.



Near the Camuy caves, I hired a local guide to take me alone into a private cave system just outside the publicly open sections. We rappelled down into the sinkhole and headed about a mile underground, swimming across underground lakes and moving carefully along the rims of weird limestone bowls.

Giant albino spiders clung to the walls, and there were forests of pale sprouted trees that grew from seeds carried in by bats. The guide pointed to a scorpion. “Touch him, you will die,” he said.

After a few hours of passing through a long series of chambers, we arrived to a point where waterfalls blocked the route and we could go no farther. At that point there were carvings of Taino deities, apparently used in some pre-Columbian initiation ceremonies.

I was really nervous, especially when I extinguished my light by ducking my helmet underwater while I was swimming—but I tried to keep my knees from shaking. As we returned, my guide calmly told me about how, at the very spot where I was wading through muddy water, he happened to step on the dead body of a man who was the object of a search and rescue.

All these experiences were grist for the imagination. One of my inspirations for this sort of research is science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster, who is far more intrepid and well-traveled than me, and who bases all his science fiction novels on his treks.

Check out this BBC video about the ultimate crystal cave in Mexico
http://www.bestofyoutube.com/story.php?title=crystal-cave-in-mexico
Via Best of YouTube