America loves a good "road story" about traveling companions who encounter adventure and learn lessons along the way.
Jack Kerouac wrote the famous beat generation classic, On The Road. Mark Twain wrote the story of Huck Finn and Jim traveling down the Mississippi. John Steinbeck wrote Travels With Charley. And James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade wrote the newly re-released The Artist's Guide to Sketching.
As Gurney recounts in their book,Before he was the painter of light, and before I was the creator of Dinotopia, Tom Kinkade and I were two unknown and penniless art students. We had grown weary of sitting in windowless classrooms, enduring lectures about art theory. We hatched an audacious plan to drop out of school for a while, hop on a freight train and discover America, documenting everything in our sketchbooks.
I expected (and would have welcomed) a narrative dedicated to their travels. The few sections of the book that mention their adventures were quite tantalizing:
However, the book is focused instead on the art of sketching, and is organized by subject matter (such as "Materials" and "Achieving Accuracy" and "Capturing Motion") rather than chronologically or geographically. It is filled with helpful examples from their travels:We slept in graveyards and the rooftops and sketched portraits of lumberjacks and coal miners. To make money we drew two dollar portraits in bars by the light of cigarette machines.… We boarded the freights again and rode all the way to Willard, Ohio, where we were kicked off at gunpoint by police officers, who had received reports that we were trying to fly a kite off the top of the train.
Some of the art was a revelation to me. For example, I really like the following pile o' chains drawn by Kinkade. The subject presents an artist with some interesting questions about economy. Do you fake it by roughly indicating random links, or is it worth going through the hassle of connecting the links in a chain?
I prefer Kinkade's good hearted pile o' chains to his later, finished paintings of sugary cottages. I also enjoyed what he saw in this gas pump.
But perhaps the part of the book I enjoyed the most was the rousing essay about the value of sketching. I like it because it starts out acknowledging how the world conspires to steer us toward more efficient enterprises:
Many artists tell us: “I guess I should sketch more often, but I never really get the chance.” We know the feeling. There just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day, and when the opportunity does come up, the sketchbook is never handy. On a vacation it seems much easier to use a camera than a sketchbook to record your experiences.
But by setting aside an entire journey dedicated to sketching "pictures of abandoned tractors and motel signs and jukeboxes," the duo learned:
The more we sketched, the more we began to realize that sketching is both the motivation and the reward for experiencing new things.
9 comments:
Looks like an awesome book.
Lots of great anecdotes of the journey are on James Gurney's substack, not sure if they're extracts from the book or additional to it.
The first edition of this was one of those books, like Loomis' Creative Illustration, that became a must-have for young illustrator, comic artists, and landscape painters who wanted good information to learn their craft. Unfortunately, because it was slightly rare and highly sought after, it rose in price. So back then, my only access to it was through interlibrary loan. But it was worth getting a look at, even in intermittent doses. This new edition looks to have a lot of additional good stuff packed into it.
I've mentioned before on this blog that I'd seen some really strong landscape oil paintings by Kinkaid before he found his "painter of light" persona/business. Wish I could find those again. He knew what he was doing. It is wild how young he and Jim Gurney were when they worked as the matte artists on Bakshi's Fire and Ice movie. They were doing Disney-worthy stuff as 20 year olds.
There are several of Kinkade's early Albert Bierstadt influenced paintings scattered throughout his site, but they're mixed in with the kitsch stuff by category (not chronological) e.g...
https://thomaskinkade.com/collections/a-room-with-a-view
and there's a category of looser, observational paintings:
https://thomaskinkade.com/pages/browse-plein-air-art
Thanks Laurence.
There are some solid paintings in there.
Kev, the switch from Kinkade’s early work to the kitsch cottages is such a steep decline in taste, that I find it hard to believe.
I’d like to know what happened. Was it a purely cynical commercial move ? Or is there more to the story ?
I recall seeing a Kinkaid ad for his "painter of light" type work in a vintage art magazine from the early 1980s, though not branded as such at that point. I was surprised how early he was working in that style, I believe prior to Fire and Ice and probably at the same time as landscape painting. So I don't think it was a matter of him engaging a one-time manual transfer switch in his soul and snapping-to-grid as The Painter of Light on a certain calendar day.
I recall hearing or reading that in their train-hopping art journeys across the country, Gurney and Kinkaid would talk out with each other their dreams and plans for how they would find success as artists with their respective IPs. Presumably Kinkaid wasn't just attempting works in the style of Bierstadt, Waugh, and Payne in order to become a gallery landscapist. As Milton Berle said of Orson Welles, "He refused to be puny." Rather, it looks to me like he was specifically trying to learn techniques of color and value luminosity, halation, dazzle, how to organize and suggest detail, and so on from those masters in order to populate his own work with mysterious and attractive visual effects.
I do know from many stories I've heard that Kinkaid could be quite mischievous, a bit of a trickster figure. But, of course, every intrepid artist I know has some, if not a whole lot, of that spirit.
When i asked “Was it a purely cynical commercial move ?” I’m wondering whether Kinkade knew very well that the kitsch cottages were vastly inferior to his earlier oils and just created to sell shed-loads to the broadest, un-art-savvy audience possible, or whether he genuinely believed that he was producing good work.
I can only assume the former, based on having seen the earlier work. Had I not seen the earlier work, I would assume he was just an artist with no taste.
The magic tricks of art are like special effects in movies. They have a beauty of their own and it is very easy for the magician-artist or movie director to become enamored with them in their own right.
Coles Phillips found that patterning a figure with the same qualities as the background - a graphic form of lost and found edges - set his work apart. Add in a fashionable yet modest gal, and he builds an entire career.
Rene Gruau found that putting a thick graphic outline around an otherwise realistic fashion drawing, and using bright spot colors and flat black, added a great deal of clarity and modern pop to his work.
Harvey Dunn in Evening in the Classroom (1934) offered, "If you make the rest of your picture flat, have your head as round as a berry." Half the pictures made for the slicks in the subsequent generations (from say 1949 to 1974) used exactly that trick.
When my mother was taking illustration at Pratt circa 1958-1961, they taught were tricks daily. There was no principles. I remember one in particular was "To get jewel tones, put sky colors on the ground, and ground colors in the sky." Another more common one was "Put light on dark and dark on light."
It is the same conventionalist thinking that gives us the piecemeal techniques of Alex Raymond, which in their modular component forms are easily transferred among practitioners. So Raymond teaches them to Prentice, Prentice teaches them to Williamson, Williamson passes them on to Schulz and others. Williamson said Prentice's suite of methods (Raymond's actually) made his ink artwork look "smart and sharp". An aesthetic effect.
Maynard Dixon Geometricized his landscapes. 60s illustrators used poster paints right out of the jar. And so on.
I don't think taste is even considered. The issue is how useful having ready-to-hand modular components and techniques is when making commercial artwork. Style is the conversion of an art problem into a design problem.
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