Four Paintings to Be Auctioned on November 4

 At the November 4 Illustration Art Auction at Heritage Auctions, four of my paintings will be offered for sale.

The Tartarus Incident paperback cover comp, oil on board.

This is the comprehensive sketch for the cover of the 1983 science fiction novel by William Greenleaf, published by Berkeley/Ace.

This was my first paperback cover as a freelance illustrator. After finishing the background paintings for Ralph Bakshi's Fire and Ice, I turned down an offer from Disney Animation and decided to take the plunge as a freelance illustrator, painting paperback covers and sending the paintings by overnight mail to New York.

Story: A space shuttle stranded on a hellish planet leaves its crew of five in a dangerous predicament.

Street scenes (pair), 1984, oil on board

These are comprehensive sketches for commissioned cover illustrations. ​The one on the right is a comp for the cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for a story by Mike Conner called "Five Mercies."

In these works you can see my fascination with British and French academic painters, such as Lawrence Alma Tadema, Ludwig Deutsch, William Logsdail, and Jean-Leon Gerome. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, overnighting the comps to the art directors for approval before proceeding with the finished art.

Companions, oil on board, 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)

Signed lower left: GURNEY

 

This is an important painting, appearing not only on the cover of the book Life Lessons from Dinosaurs, but also on page 64 of Dinotopia: The World Beneath.

 


Much to my amusement, it also appeared as a meme. It was widely circulated as a viral meme with a tagline "That wasn't a microdose."

Link to the Heritage Auction website

Living With Mammoths in Dinotopia

The partnership with mammoths began modestly, with villagers gathering the tufts of wool that the gentle giants shed in spring. 

Later, when orphaned calves were taken in and successfully reared, the community recognized their potential as companions and helpers. This gave rise to organized “mammoth nurseries,” where young calves and human children grew up alongside one another, playing games together—games like Tusk Ring, Wool Tag, Trunk Lift, Shadow Step, Splash Parade, Stomp and Sing, and Bundle Push. 

If you're curious about how any of those games work, just ask me in the comments, and I'll explain, based on Arthur Denison's journals.

Art from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

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Marty Owings Reviews Books on Sketching

Marty Owings: "If you read the book it will unlock many secrets to being a better sketcher." 

Marty Owings on YouTube 

Direct link to my bookstore

First Contact with Mirrors

Svetlana at fortune-telling by K.Bryullov, 1836

Mirrors have a powerful effect on people who have only seen their reflection in stll water. Individuals recognize themselves immediately, but that's just the beginning.

Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter presented mirrors to indigenous people in New Guinea, and noted that they were intensely curious about them, and they underwent a series of shocks. These same shocks occur in other cultures, too:

Recognition shock. Realizing it’s your face. Followed by testing and play. This is a human universal, and holds true for several non-human animals, including apes, dolphins, elephants (and maybe mice, manta rays, and perhaps even ants.)

Grooming. Using the mirror to apply makeup, face painting. Societies that get universal access to mirrors typically go through a phase of obsession with personal adornment and identity. If mirrors are more rare they become objects of high status and trade value.

Moral Framing. Sometimes an elder will use the mirror to drive home an ethical or moral point. Socrates told young people to look often into a mirror, and “if they were handsome, they should not disgrace their beauty by evil conduct, and if they were ugly, they should counterbalance the defect by their accomplishments.” (Lives of Eminent Philosophers II.33)

Spiritual Uses. Some Greeks participated in catoptromancy, a kind of divination using mirrors, which was later condemned by the church.

Normalization. This is the mode of interaction we’re familiar with, where the mirror is just an ordinary tool and part of our personal grooming routine.

Young Woman Looking in Mirror by Nicolas Regnier

Carpenter on the “shocks” of first mirrors

In Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! (1972), Edmund Carpenter recalls giving mirrors to people in Papua New Guinea’s Sepik region:

“The visual shock was overwhelming. After the first startled recognition, came testing. They grimaced, danced, made faces. They examined their teeth, painted themselves, laughed or cried. Some hid the mirrors, as if they were too dangerous, others traded them as treasures. … The mirror provided an image of the self, detached and external, and this provoked not vanity so much as metaphysical unease.” (Carpenter 1972, pp. 118–120)

What looked to early European observers like narcissism was in fact a deeper confrontation or encounter with a person’s identity. The mirror was a shock because it externalized the self.

A mirror gives us an image without substance. It is never a neutral object to someone encountering it for the first time. It can be a goad to virtue, a diagnostic of fate, or a glimpse of another order of reality.

Advice I'd Give My 24-Year-Old Self

 

Jeanette and me, age 24

The part of my recent YouTube video that attracted the most interest was my answer to Andrew’s question about what advice I'd give myself when I was 24.

If I could give my 24-year-old self advice, I’d say: Maintain your independence of vision and work for yourself.

But honestly, I didn’t need that advice back then—I was already on a solid path. I had worked as a background painter for Ralph Bakshi’s renegade animation studio, published my first book, and was about to turn down a job offer from Disney.

I was getting married, moving east, and starting a freelance illustration career. I was still essentially broke, but I was learning a lot, and I would have said to my older self, "Yeah, yeah, I'm already doing what you're saying."

Age 20, with Paul Chadwick and Tom Kinkade, posing for reference

Age 36, working on Dinotopia: The World Beneath

What would have caught my attention at 24 was a glimpse into how dramatically the world would change for artists over the next 40 years because of digital technology. Read the rest at Substack.

What I Learned from Painting this Boat

This blue boat catches my eye as I explore an island in Maine. It's beached at an odd angle above the high tide line. Not far away, a flock of birds gathers on the wires. 

As I paint the picture, I answer your questions about the gouache technique, the overcast light, and the composition. 

But I still wonder about the story of the sailboat, so I ask my friend Clayton Bright, who lives nearby, to explain. He says the boat was used to teach kids to sail. It became obsolete, but the valuable lesson of slowing down and appreciating the present moment—a lesson he learned from his grandmother—remains true.

Read the Q and As on Substack

Which Colors Are Primaries?

Which of these colors are primaries? One of the most basic art questions turns out to be not so simple.

Full story on Substack today.

I'm Editing a Video, and I'd Love to Include Some of Your Questions

 I’m editing a YouTube video, where I paint this little plein-air study of a stranded sailboat:

It’s painted in gouache over a casein priming.

If you have a quick question about the process, you can ask it here in the comments. Or, even better, you can ask a voice question on this Speakpipe link.

Painting from Imagination

 

The key to painting imaginary subjects is to hold onto the dream image as long as possible, even if it's hazy and tentative. Then you work like crazy to find analogues in the real world, and gather references of any kind. Be like a sponge, and "fill the bucket." 

More in my Substack post "How to Visualize a Dream."

'You should be sketching always, always'

 

Abbey wrote to an art student: "You should be sketching always, always. Draw anything. Draw the dishes on the table while you are waiting for your breakfast. Draw the people in the station while you are waiting for your train. Look at everything. It is all part of your world. You are going to be one of a profession to which everything on this earth means something." More on Substack