This is part of a regular series called Inspirations. In this series, I explore the art historical periods and artists who captivate, teach, and inspire me. This is the art that makes me want to create pieces of awe and wonder. You can find previous posts here.
I love James Gurney as an artist, illustrator, and author. My appreciation for Gurney is based on his work ethic, guts (see below), his business acumen, and especially his personal art appreciation that he infuses into everything he does as an artist. Gurney is a true student of art: always learning, and always teaching. Gurney’s influence on my own art is, therefore, more about who he is as a person and artist than what he produces. So rather than discussing one or two of his pieces, I want to instead highlight how often he thinks about art history.
Gurney completed a bachelor’s degree before attending art school, where he lasted one year before hitchhiking and train jumping across the United States with classmate Thomas Kinkade. Thus his exposure to a structured history of art was limited, at best. Yet the depth and breadth of his art history knowledge is singularly impressive. Looking over Gurney’s Substack, Paint Here, of the almost 100 entries he has created since 11 January 2024, more than 20 are explicitly about art history and artists. And in a random sample of ten entries about different topics, each entry made reference to art history and artists, or employed art history in some illustrative manner.
For example, in the entry Contre Jour Lighting from 4 March 2024, he writes, “Artists of the 19th Century did wonders with contre jour. You’ll find it with Royal Academicians like Atkinson Grimshaw …, Barbizon painters like Constant Troyon …, and American landscapists like Frederic Church.” And in an entry about how to handle days when you just do not want to paint, he opens with the following: “Do you have to be inspired and in the mood to do good work? Howard Pyle didn't think so. ‘That is all nonsense,’ he said. ‘I frequently have to force myself to make a start in the morning; but after a short while I find I can work. Only hard and regular work will bring success’”
How does this artist influence me? I have benefited enormously from learning art history on several levels: intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, and certainly artistically. There are numerous reasons why I might deliberately study an art historical period or an artist, including: curiosity, inspiration, a desire to learn more, to study how an artist did something or why, or for the joy of learning. None of these are mutually exclusive, and while I may start off with one motive, the others will almost certainly soon follow.
Learning art history and studying other artists teaches you that it’s “ok” to be yourself as an artist. It is important to learn techniques and rules, but if you want to break them, you can do so. It is as equally important to see where artists fall, such as van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters - a piece which, ironically, I really like but which most art critics, historians, and van Gogh’s contemporaries rightly disparage as being very weak in draftsmanship and color. But this is van Gogh! Seeing such a famous artist produce something so inarticulate is an encouragement in the face of my own art failures. It is also encouraging to see artists change their style, such as Picasso as he moved from his blue period to his cubist era.
What learning art history affords me, then, more than emulation or even education (in the sense of the acquisition and consumption of structured knowledge) is permission to be me as an artist: to learn, grow, change, fail, and to keep painting and drawing. The following four studies are illustrative.
Wow!!! This just makes me really excited to try...once again