James Gurney
| James Gurney | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 14, 1958 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Art Center College of Design |
James Gurney (born June 14, 1958) is an artist and author best known for his illustrated book series Dinotopia, which is presented in the form of a 19th-century explorer’s journal from an island utopia cohabited by humans and dinosaurs. He lives in Rhinebeck, New York, in the Hudson Valley of New York State.
Gurney grew up in Palo Alto, California, the youngest of five children of Joanna and Robert Gurney, a mechanical engineer. Encouraged to tinker in the workshop, he built puppets, gliders, masks, and kites, and taught himself to draw by means of books about the illustrators Howard Pyle and Norman Rockwell.
He studied archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a BA in Anthropology with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1979. He then studied illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California for a couple of semesters. Prompted by a cross-country adventure on freight trains, he and Thomas Kinkade coauthored The Artist’s Guide to Sketching in 1982. Gurney and Kinkade also worked as painters of background scenes for the animated film Fire and Ice, co-produced by Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta.
Gurney's freelance illustration career began in the 1980s, during which time he developed his characteristic realistic renderings of fantastic scenes, painted in oil using methods similar to the academic realists and Golden Age illustrators. He painted more than 70 covers for science fiction and fantasy paperback novels, and he created several stamp designs for the US Postal Service, most notably The World of Dinosaurs in 1996.
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