Art Books

I remember when I used to comb through new and used art bookstores looking for anything I could find on 19th century painters or Golden Age illustrators.

Here's a sketch from about 1985 of my wife Jeanette reading to me from a book on John William Waterhouse.

Before computers and the internet, finding a good art book was like uncovering a vein of gold. In those days, you couldn't find much on Bouguereau, Meissonier, Gerome, or Waterhouse. Sargent was just beginning to come into the light. It seemed worth spending $50 for a book, even if it had only two or three good color reproductions. I would stick yellow tags on the best pages, with the name of the artist written in small letters so I could find them again.

The casual availability of images now is both a blessing and a curse. It makes me treasure each image a little less, perhaps because I haven't spent so much effort on the hunt. Still, I'm grateful to be able to find so many digital images in cyberspace. But I have faith that there's much more to be discovered. The internet may be a million miles wide, but it's only an inch deep when it comes to some artists who have yet to arrive from obscurity.

Is "The Hero's Journey" a Tired Cliché?

The film critic who calls himself "The Hulk" argues that the hero's journey has become a screenwriting crutch. 

According to Hulk, Joseph Campbell originally formulated the paradigm to help analyze existing myths and to draw connections between them. Campbell's template was made famous by George Lucas, who used it as the deep structure for the original Star Wars movie. Since then it has become a production template used by screenwriters to create a glut of similar films and video games.

Hulk says it's not the only story plan that works for adventure movies, and it has become a tiresome cliché: "Our society has overtly adopted the book's breakdown of the hero journey as some kind of ready-made app for paint-by-numbers storytelling."

Hulk blog post on the Hero's Journey myth
The Hero with a Thousand Faces  (the book that started it all)

"They will never shoot you for what you leave out of a picture."

When Norman Rockwell took on the challenge of illustrating Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, he went to great lengths for authenticity, traveling to Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, to research characters, costumes and props.  

Here is his initial charcoal drawing for the scene of whitewashing the fence. Tom Sawyer has escaped his chore by convincing his friends that it's a special privilege to paint a fence. Twain lists the loot that they paid Tom, including: a kite, a dead rat, a cat with one eye, and a window sash. Tom sits on a barrel, chuckling into his hand at his pals, who work hard at the job he was supposed to do.


At some point Rockwell must have felt that his original conception was too literal, too much "on the nose." His finished composition removes Tom Sawyer entirely.

Rockwell once said that "every single object shown in a picture should have its place there because it contributes to the central theme of the picture. Otherwise it simply does not belong and should be discarded ruthlessly."

Or as his hero Howard Pyle once said, "They will never shoot you for what you leave out of a picture."

Video Gaming Activates Pleasure Centers

A study by Simone Kuhn of Ghent, Belgium suggests that playing video games changes the brain and activates the same pleasure centers that light up when gambling. Even when losing, a player is hooked by the payoffs of hormones and deep neural centers.

But I think that puts video games in an unfair light. I'll bet that a lot of the things we love to do, such as sketching, probably activate the same "reward hub." For me, laying in a watercolor wash feels like pulling a slot machine handle. More times than not, I lose my quarter and come up empty. But something in my brain says, "Pull the handle one more time!"

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BBC article about the study

Original article cited in Nature

Graphic adapted from CRN blog

Dinotopia Exhibition Residency

There are less than three weeks left of the exhibition "Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney" at the Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin.


Earlier this month I traveled to Wisconsin to do a residency there. I had the pleasure of walking through the exhibit with a variety of school groups and museum patrons. Here I'm showing them "Dinosaur Parade" with the tabernacle frame by Troy Stafford.


We had a drawing workshop with several classes of fifth graders and a high school group.

 The snow sculpture of a Triceratops was a little reduced by the early spring weather, but it was still very impressive.

I had a chance to meet one of the Team USA Snow Sculptors, Mike Sponholtz, who I sketched while we had lunch together.

The Woodson Dinotopia show will end on April 7. For those of you on the east coast of the US, there will be another chance to see the paintings "Garden of Hope" and "Dinosaur Parade" at the exhibit opening June 3 called "At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic" at the Allentown Museum in Pennsylvania.

Also, I'm pleased to announce that starting September 22, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut will host a whole different Dinotopia exhibit called "Dinotopia: Science, Art, and Imagination," with about 70 original paintings that haven't been seen anywhere on the eastern seaboard before.
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Woodson Art Museum Dinotopia Exhibit

Charles Knight Book

My illustration of the tyrannosaurid Teratophoneus taking down a Gryposaurus appears in the issue of Scientific American that's on the newsstands now.


One of the inspirations for the painting was this 1897 painting of Laelaps by Charles Knight (1874-1953). Knight was one of the founding figures of paleoart, working more than a century ago.

He started out by drawing living animals at the zoo, then studied animal anatomy and worked at the American Museum of Natural History. Despite obstacles like vision problems, he went on to paint many murals and illustrations reconstructing extinct life forms. His work has influenced several generations of artists and filmmakers throughout the 20th century.

An excellent new coffee table book on Knight by author and anthropologist Richard Milner has just been released. It tells his life story, shows a lot of his drawings, and explains how he developed his remarkable vision of extinct life.


Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time
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Charles Knight on Wikipedia
Previously: Lost Continent video

The Hills above Clonmel

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, everyone! 

Here's a little plein air painting that I did in County Tipperary, Ireland in 2004.

On that trip I didn't rent a car; I just bummed rides. I had all my painting gear in one backpack and all my other gear in a suitcase. I wandered on foot each day alone in search of a motif while my son Dan was in town studying Irish music and prepping for the Fleadh Cheoil.

This day I walked up a hill road until I found a break in the hedgerow and a place with a big view. I could look way down into the valley and almost hear the fever of the jigs and reels, while the silent sea of heaven rolled overhead.

Art of Video Games Exhibition

Today the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC opened an exhibition called "The Art of Video Games."



(Video link) The show contains original art and interviews with designers, developers, writers, programmers, and scholars. Curated by Chris Mellisinos, it is divided into three parts, exploring the "creative process, the mechanics that allowed things to move forward, and the evolution of form over time."

The exhibition will be on view through September 30.
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There's also a book called The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect
The Art of Video Games Exhibition

Art Order Interview

Over at the blog The Art Order, Randy Gallegos has just posted an interview with me and Randy Asplund (expert at creating medieval manuscripts and illumination).

The main theme of the interview is how to balance your art with other interests.

One of Randy's questions: "It's hard for us to imagine now, but if the whole art-thing hadn't worked out very well for you, professionally, what might you have done instead?"

A: Scary thought. My only job skill was dishwashing. It was paint or starve. I was lucky to marry a woman who was thrifty and willing to go long stretches with no income. We figured we'd make it in art or die trying." Read the rest.

Delta Wing Takes to the Track

The revolutionary new race car called the Delta Wing had its first track test on its way to Le Mans this summer. 

(Video link) The car was designed by Ben Bowlby and built by the team at All American Racers, headed up by Dan Gurney and his son Justin. 

Two time Grand Am champion Alex Gurney had the honor of being the first driver to get behind the wheel and try it out on the Buttonwillow Raceway in California, where it delivered a near flawless performance.

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All American Racers press release

Photos of the first track test

Road and Track description of the car

Previously on GurneyJourney

The Delta Wing at LeMans

Alex Gurney, race driver
Goldsworthy Gurney's Steam Carriages