[From the Ithaca Times] [Photos on our flickr] Paleontologists aside, how many adults can you name who never outgrew a wide-eyed fascination with dinosaurs? Narrow that field further, and see if you can think of anyone who still actively pursues this interest. Make a final cut and rack your brain for even one grown-up who’s made a viable living chasing their dino-passions. Chances are you’ve worked your way down to one man: James Gurney. The author and illustrator of the award-winning “Dinotopia” books, Gurney spoke Monday at the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators’s 2008 conference, held at Ithaca College’s Emerson Suites. We sat down with Gurney to talk about dinosaurs, artistic agility, and his vibrant world where the two meet.
Popcorn Youth: How did the whole Dinotopia concept come about? Was it a collection of ideas you had accumulated over the years, or did you set out to create this world from scratch?
James Gurney: Well, I think the idea for Dintotopia kind of snuck up on me, because I had been working as an illustrator for National Geographic Magazine — doing ancient civilizations and dinosaurs — and I was also working as a paperback cover artist for fantasy and science fiction books. It was during an expedition with National Geographic — working with archeologists — that I began thinking more about lost worlds and lost empires, and thought I could do a couple of individual paintings. So I just started with a parade of kids and dinosaurs and another separate painting of a city with a huge waterfall around it. After doing those big paintings, it occurred to me to do a map and to think of this in terms of a journal of an explorer in the Victorian period. From that initial idea, I came up with the idea of the longer-form picture book. It snuck up on me in stages, I guess you could say.
Popcorn Youth: In the preface of your first book you write, “All the dinosaurs are real, based on fossil evidence;” yet your art is characterized by a florid imaginativeness. Is balancing these two forces ever difficult?
Gurney: Well, in every fantasy or science fiction premise, there are certain rules you have to set up. And in the case of Dinotopia, I wanted to set up a world where all of the creatures on this island are creatures that are extinct in our world. So you would find brachiosaurs, and you would find trilobites, but you wouldn’t find dogs and horses. And all the people that were there have been shipwrecked from all times and ages, so you can present human civilization and cultures from various places in time, and then play with the idea of how they interact. The other idea that was kind of crucial to the concept of Dinotopia was: even though dinosaurs are real and based on actual fossils, and they’re painted to look the ways scientists want them to look, I wanted to endow them with personalities and with some sort of wisdom that humans could benefit from so it was more of a partnership and the dinosaurs weren’t just beasts of burden. So with those ground rules in place, I started drawing the map in more detail, and thinking of different scenarios for people to interact with dinosaurs.
Popcorn Youth: Take us through a typical day in front of the easel.
Gurney: There is no typical day because some days are spent at the computer; other days are spent out sketching; some days are spent in museums talking with scientists and getting their input. But when I’m working on an actual Dinotopia book, I have about one hundred and fifty paintings to do over a period of about two and a half years. That means that doing a painting about every for days or so — If I have a luxury of time, maybe a week for a painting. I’ll have lots of model dinosaurs all around me, and miniature maquettes of the architecture made out of cardboard and plaster and Styrofoam. Those I set up under lights to try and imagine the light and shadow, and to try to get that aspect of it convincing. Sometimes I have people over in costumes, dressing up and acting out the parts. Sometimes I put on costumes myself and try to get into the characters.
The very last part of all of that is the painting, which is done fairly traditionally with oil paints — pretty much the same way it would have been done one hundred and fifty years ago.
Popcorn Youth: Who is your biggest artistic influence?
Gurney: Howard Pyle, the great American illustrator, N.C. Wyeth and of course Norman Rockwell was a hero of mine since I was a little kid because of his thoroughness of planning and working up a picture. But I also like the British painters like Alma Tatama from the nineteenth century and scenes of Roman life. The French academic painters like Gerome Goublereau who used both their imagination and their observation together to create imaginary worlds that looked realistic.
Popcorn Youth: Do you have formal training or are you self-taught?
Gurney: I went to University of California at Berkeley and majored in archeology — a passion of mine — and I didn’t know how that might combine with artwork, but later I went on to art school at Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena. I left there before graduating because I got a job in the movie business painting backgrounds. But most of what I learned was self-taught. I looked through old art instruction books from the nineteenth century and kind of made myself a program of self-teaching, basically.
Popcorn Youth: Your books are considered “children’s literature,” yet their appeal seems to transcend age barriers. Do you feel restricted by this label?
Gurney: I think the reason they sometimes get put in with children’s literature is because they have pictures in them and we always think that picture books are for kids. But these are really picture books for older readers. Most of my readers are teenagers and adults and college students, and of course there are some younger kids, but they’re not written to a young level. My philosophy about books in general is that they shouldn’t be written for any particular age. A book like Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer and things like that are just books that are written to please the author. A book should be like a swimming pool — it should have a shallow end and a deep end. If you’re a kid, you should know you won’t be able to touch the bottom at first, but there’s other places you can swim off to if you want to, and have stuff that’s going over your head.
Popcorn Youth: Are there places you’ve been that inspired some of the art in the two Dinotopia books?
Gurney: Places in our world are far more bizarre than places you could dream up if you were trying to come up with a fantasy universe. I think Peter Jackson realized that with Lord of the Rings — the stuff in New Zealand that was just beyond what he could have dreamed of. I went to the American Southwest — the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon. I also went on location with National Geographic to Jerusalem and Athens and Rome on part of our research and it really fired me up for ancient, ruined cities. I live in the Hudson Valley in New York State and I do a lot of outdoor painting, and a lot of the scenes are based on various on-the-spot paintings that I do. So it’s a fantasy world, but it’s based very much on the real world.
Popcorn Youth: In the first of your four Dinotopia books, the “Code of Dinotopia” enunciates a certain egalitarian, environmentalist politics. Were the rules you created a reflection of your own personal convictions?
Gurney: Not exactly. I was trying to come up with a world that had its own logic. I didn’t want to have a sermon in the book or anything like that. For the code, I tried to come up with some of the basic ideas that are at the heart of all the great philosophies and religions: the idea of doing unto others as you’d have them do unto you, I mean that’s the center of a lot of Eastern religions and the Qur’an and in all kinds of different places. So there’s a reflection of that.
In the newest book, I didn’t want to do a tablet or a code. I wanted instead to have some of the big issues debated by people on different sides. I let these two sides battle it out and let the reader think about those issues in a different way.
Popcorn Youth: If dinosaurs walked the earth today, who would they vote for?
Gurney: Well they would probably have to put up their own candidate, and I suppose it would either be a tyrannosaurus or some kind of plant-eater.
