Four Paintings to Be Auctioned on November 4

 At the November 4 Illustration Art Auction at Heritage Auctions, four of my paintings will be offered for sale.

The Tartarus Incident paperback cover comp, oil on board.

This is the comprehensive sketch for the cover of the 1983 science fiction novel by William Greenleaf, published by Berkeley/Ace.

This was my first paperback cover as a freelance illustrator. After finishing the background paintings for Ralph Bakshi's Fire and Ice, I turned down an offer from Disney Animation and decided to take the plunge as a freelance illustrator, painting paperback covers and sending the paintings by overnight mail to New York.

Story: A space shuttle stranded on a hellish planet leaves its crew of five in a dangerous predicament.

Street scenes (pair), 1984, oil on board

These are comprehensive sketches for commissioned cover illustrations. ​The one on the right is a comp for the cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for a story by Mike Conner called "Five Mercies."

In these works you can see my fascination with British and French academic painters, such as Lawrence Alma Tadema, Ludwig Deutsch, William Logsdail, and Jean-Leon Gerome. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, overnighting the comps to the art directors for approval before proceeding with the finished art.

Companions, oil on board, 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)

Signed lower left: GURNEY

 

This is an important painting, appearing not only on the cover of the book Life Lessons from Dinosaurs, but also on page 64 of Dinotopia: The World Beneath.

 


Much to my amusement, it also appeared as a meme. It was widely circulated as a viral meme with a tagline "That wasn't a microdose."

Link to the Heritage Auction website