Painting the Pre-Electric Night

 

Before electricity, nighttime seemed a lot brighter. That’s because electric lights constrict our pupils, making the darkness darker. Read more on my free Substack.

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

Living With Mammoths in Dinotopia

The partnership with mammoths began modestly, with villagers gathering the tufts of wool that the gentle giants shed in spring. 

Later, when orphaned calves were taken in and successfully reared, the community recognized their potential as companions and helpers. This gave rise to organized “mammoth nurseries,” where young calves and human children grew up alongside one another, playing games together—games like Tusk Ring, Wool Tag, Trunk Lift, Shadow Step, Splash Parade, Stomp and Sing, and Bundle Push. 

If you're curious about how any of those games work, just ask me in the comments, and I'll explain, based on Arthur Denison's journals.

Art from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

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Marty Owings Reviews Books on Sketching

Marty Owings: "If you read the book it will unlock many secrets to being a better sketcher." 

Marty Owings on YouTube 

Direct link to my bookstore

First Contact with Mirrors

Svetlana at fortune-telling by K.Bryullov, 1836

Mirrors have a powerful effect on people who have only seen their reflection in stll water. Individuals recognize themselves immediately, but that's just the beginning.

Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter presented mirrors to indigenous people in New Guinea, and noted that they were intensely curious about them, and they underwent a series of shocks. These same shocks occur in other cultures, too:

Recognition shock. Realizing it’s your face. Followed by testing and play. This is a human universal, and holds true for several non-human animals, including apes, dolphins, elephants (and maybe mice, manta rays, and perhaps even ants.)

Grooming. Using the mirror to apply makeup, face painting. Societies that get universal access to mirrors typically go through a phase of obsession with personal adornment and identity. If mirrors are more rare they become objects of high status and trade value.

Moral Framing. Sometimes an elder will use the mirror to drive home an ethical or moral point. Socrates told young people to look often into a mirror, and “if they were handsome, they should not disgrace their beauty by evil conduct, and if they were ugly, they should counterbalance the defect by their accomplishments.” (Lives of Eminent Philosophers II.33)

Spiritual Uses. Some Greeks participated in catoptromancy, a kind of divination using mirrors, which was later condemned by the church.

Normalization. This is the mode of interaction we’re familiar with, where the mirror is just an ordinary tool and part of our personal grooming routine.

Young Woman Looking in Mirror by Nicolas Regnier

Carpenter on the “shocks” of first mirrors

In Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! (1972), Edmund Carpenter recalls giving mirrors to people in Papua New Guinea’s Sepik region:

“The visual shock was overwhelming. After the first startled recognition, came testing. They grimaced, danced, made faces. They examined their teeth, painted themselves, laughed or cried. Some hid the mirrors, as if they were too dangerous, others traded them as treasures. … The mirror provided an image of the self, detached and external, and this provoked not vanity so much as metaphysical unease.” (Carpenter 1972, pp. 118–120)

What looked to early European observers like narcissism was in fact a deeper confrontation or encounter with a person’s identity. The mirror was a shock because it externalized the self.

A mirror gives us an image without substance. It is never a neutral object to someone encountering it for the first time. It can be a goad to virtue, a diagnostic of fate, or a glimpse of another order of reality.

Advice I'd Give My 24-Year-Old Self

 

Jeanette and me, age 24

The part of my recent YouTube video that attracted the most interest was my answer to Andrew’s question about what advice I'd give myself when I was 24.

If I could give my 24-year-old self advice, I’d say: Maintain your independence of vision and work for yourself.

But honestly, I didn’t need that advice back then—I was already on a solid path. I had worked as a background painter for Ralph Bakshi’s renegade animation studio, published my first book, and was about to turn down a job offer from Disney.

I was getting married, moving east, and starting a freelance illustration career. I was still essentially broke, but I was learning a lot, and I would have said to my older self, "Yeah, yeah, I'm already doing what you're saying."

Age 20, with Paul Chadwick and Tom Kinkade, posing for reference

Age 36, working on Dinotopia: The World Beneath

What would have caught my attention at 24 was a glimpse into how dramatically the world would change for artists over the next 40 years because of digital technology. Read the rest at Substack.

What I Learned from Painting this Boat

This blue boat catches my eye as I explore an island in Maine. It's beached at an odd angle above the high tide line. Not far away, a flock of birds gathers on the wires. 

As I paint the picture, I answer your questions about the gouache technique, the overcast light, and the composition. 

But I still wonder about the story of the sailboat, so I ask my friend Clayton Bright, who lives nearby, to explain. He says the boat was used to teach kids to sail. It became obsolete, but the valuable lesson of slowing down and appreciating the present moment—a lesson he learned from his grandmother—remains true.

Read the Q and As on Substack

Which Colors Are Primaries?

Which of these colors are primaries? One of the most basic art questions turns out to be not so simple.

Full story on Substack today.

I'm Editing a Video, and I'd Love to Include Some of Your Questions

 I’m editing a YouTube video, where I paint this little plein-air study of a stranded sailboat:

It’s painted in gouache over a casein priming.

If you have a quick question about the process, you can ask it here in the comments. Or, even better, you can ask a voice question on this Speakpipe link.

Painting from Imagination

 

The key to painting imaginary subjects is to hold onto the dream image as long as possible, even if it's hazy and tentative. Then you work like crazy to find analogues in the real world, and gather references of any kind. Be like a sponge, and "fill the bucket." 

More in my Substack post "How to Visualize a Dream."

'You should be sketching always, always'

 

Abbey wrote to an art student: "You should be sketching always, always. Draw anything. Draw the dishes on the table while you are waiting for your breakfast. Draw the people in the station while you are waiting for your train. Look at everything. It is all part of your world. You are going to be one of a profession to which everything on this earth means something." More on Substack

Is the Computer a "Bicycle for the Mind?"

Steve Jobs wanted the personal computer to be like a “bicycle for the mind.” Has it worked out that way for you?

More on my Substack.

Cesare Tallone's Sight-Size Paintings

Cesare Tallone was an Italian painter born on August 11, 1853, in Savona, Italy. After losing his father at a young age, he moved to Alessandria, where he began his artistic training under decorative artist Pietro Sassi, and then he continued his study at the Brera Academy in Milan.

During his time at the academy, he gained access to Francesco Hayez's studio. Tallone's career flourished as he won several awards, including the triennial combined schools of painting competition at the Brera exhibition in 1879. 

Cesare Tallone (1853–1919) working on a portrait of Alessandro Pirovano, about 1911.

Like his friend Mancini, he practiced sight-size painting. He became well-known for his portraiture, gaining commissions from intellectual, bourgeois, and aristocratic circles. 

Tallone's artistic legacy was further cemented through his teaching positions at the Carrara Academy in Bergamo and later at the Brera Academy in Milan, where he passed away on June 21, 1919.

Reflecting on My Dad

I was never sure what my dad did for a living, because I never got to visit his workplace. He was in mechanical engineering jobs that were either highly technical or top secret.

Once he mentioned that he was in “high vacuum technology.” To my grade-school imagination, that meant he drove around in a giant Hoover vacuum cleaner.

He came home at 5:30 every day. I would wait for him on my red bicycle and ride alongside his car for the last block to our house.

Dad read widely, and he must have had a lot of deep thoughts. But he kept those them mostly locked up inside his head. Maybe I didn’t have enough wit to ask him the right questions to unlock those thoughts.

But also, American dads were probably more remote to their kids in those days than they are now.

He’s been gone now for almost 25 years, and I still think fondly about him. When I clear my throat, I realize I sound exactly like him. I can’t help imagining him riding around on that giant vacuum cleaner.

Painting a Monkey Skull

The Akin Free Library in Pawling, New York is like a time machine that takes you back to a different way of organizing and presenting knowledge about nature.

It's worth a visit, but it's only open Saturdays and Sundays 1:00-4:00d, May - October. Ask to make sure, but it's usually OK to bring stools neat sketch supplies, such as pencil or watercolors.

LWatch this painting bbeing made Here's a link to video

Remote Control Models

When I was a teenager I was obsessed with remote-control airplanes and boats.

 
This is high-school-age me with a Hobie Hawk, a two-servo glider with elliptical dihedral. The kit was invented by Hobart Alter, same guy who created the Hobie catamaran.

It had heavy wing loading, so was a fast flier. But I didn’t fly it much because I lost it in a forest of poison oak while slope soaring in Pescadero.

I also designed and built a flying-wing glider. No tail assembly, just wings. The airfoil changed from a lifting airfoil at the root of the wing to a reverse airfoil at the tips of the swept-back wings. That held the lifting surface at a good angle of incidence. The rudder and elevator controls went through a mechanical mixer on the servo brick that activated the elevons.

This is the kind of thing I thought about in high school during my free time. I’d be standing on the ground, with my imagination soaring 300 feet above me, dreaming what it would feel like to be a red-tail hawk.
My dad was a mechanical engineer, and he would occasionally give me pointers on tools and build techniques.

I also made a tugboat out of pine planks stacked and glued, carved to a hull shape, and fiberglassed over. This one took me all summer to build. The motor was powered by a motorcycle battery. It took some perilous voyages across the chop of the Palo Alto duck pond. It had lights inside and looked pretty realistic at night.

I didn’t know this at the time, but my fascination with scratch-built, remote-controlled airplanes and boats set me up for building the fantasy world of Dinotopia. Making these models helped project my imagination into places. Working for months on a single project gave me an instinct for delayed gratification.

 
There was real peril for the gliders. I once handed the stick to another pilot, inviting him to try flying the wing inverted, and he snapped off both wings by half-looping out of it. Poor guy, he felt so bad. But no problem. I went home, fixed it, and flew on.

 
My dad built his own glider and put a strand of piano wire in the leading edge of the wing “in case of a midair collision.” That day arrived: CRASH! Down went the other guy's plane. But Dad's plane survived. He kind of grinned, but didn't tell the other guy about the piano wire.

Flower Pastels of Laura Coombs Hills

Laura Coombs Hills (1852-1952)

On Substack today, a look at the Life and work of Laura Coombs Hills.

Laura Coombs Hills (1852-1952)

On Substack today, a look at the Life and work of Laura Coombs Hills.

Wikipedia  Laura Coombs Hills

Dark Mirrors

For centuries artist have used darkened mirrors and smoked lenses to help them view a real landscape in simplified tonal values. More on Substack

You're Not Allowed To Imagine Thaat

What are the implications of an AI model that refuses to cooperate? What happens when it tells me that I’m not supposed to imagine something? What if it becomes illegal to imagine something without using a safe-certified AI? More on Substack
 

Drawing Moving Objects

Drawing moving objects is a whole different challenge compared to drawing things that hold still.  Sometimes I like to analyze a common motion such as putting on a jacket by drawing different stages of the action.

Here I'm looking for the long curving lines describing the forms. I draw these with simple, graceful strokes of the sable brush. (from The Artist's Guide to Sketching)