James Gurney paints people riding armor-wearing dinosaurs.

He isn’t 12, though. He’s 52.

But he isn’t crazy. This New York-based artist has a degree in archaeology from the University of California at Berkeley. He just never seemed to outgrow his childhood fascination with dinosaurs.

So, he created a fictional world called “Dinotopia” as the subject of a picture book series. The books detail the life of a 17th-century explorer who documents the lives of coexisting dinosaurs and humans. His art has been published into four books, but is now being exhibited at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.

“What I was trying to do was turn the simplistic nature of dinosaurs, turn those on their heads and look at them in a new way,” said Gurney.

He wants to show dinosaurs as more than just predators by giving them more humanlike characteristics. For example, the artist points out that dinosaur behavior includes courtship, migration, group behavior, communication, rearing of young and sleeping.

The artist was inspired partly by American paleontologist Jack Horner, who discovered that some dinosaurs had motherly traits and took care of a specific nesting area. Gurney explained that this discovery changed the way humans view dinosaurs. He hopes to do the same through his art.

The Dinotopia books are the illustrated journals of the main character, Arthur Denison. The explorer’s sketches capture Dinotopians — the humans and dinosaurs that live and work together on an island.

Every member of the Dinotopian society has a role. Some Dinotopians take care of the young, while some dinosaur-human pairs act as flying messengers, who travel the Dinotopian continent. Others are metal workers, linguists, farmers and poop-picker-uppers.

“He enjoys filling his images with a lot of wonderful information and detail,” said Glenn Tomlinson, curator of education at the museum, “so that when you look at these paintings, you can really lose yourself in this imaginary world of Dinotopia.”

Port St. Lucie resident Cindy Robinson, 47, agrees.

“It puts [dinosaurs] in a new perspective. More as an equal,” said Robinson. “You always think of taking care of an animal, not the animal taking care of you.”

After graduating from college, Gurney went to an art school where he met his now-wife Jeanette. After spending only a short period of time there, he was hired to paint backgrounds for the movie industry.

“My vocation and avocation are in the visual arts,” said Gurney. “I’ve been lucky to make my living in this field.”

After working in the film industry, he started illustrating. He painted more than 70 science fiction and fantasy paperback book covers and was commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service to illustrate 17 stamps. He also illustrated for National Geographic for two decades.

The artist has had an interest in ancient cultures ever since he was a child.

“I read those magazines as a kid, looking for pharaohs and dinosaurs. I knew I wanted to be an archaeologist,” said Gurney. “Archaeologists can reconstruct an entire culture. It’s amazing how little survives. I wanted the Dinotopia books to have a kind of National Geographic feel to them.”

The artist’s interest in archaeology, and ultimately the inspiration that led Gurney to create Dinotopia, were the result of a visit to a museum as a child.

“My parents pointed to the skeleton of the Allosaurus and said, ‘That’s a dinosaur,'” explained Gurney, who for years afterward believed that the Allosaurus skeleton would hop off its pedestal at night and run around the halls of the museum. “The idea of a skeleton coming to life was an idea that occupied my imagination as a kid.”

Taking his fascination with dinosaurs, archaeology and art to the next level, Gurney began to construct the Dinotopian world. He started with a few unrelated paintings he had completed in his off time. From there, he created the first of four Dinotopia books, A Land Apart from Time, which has about 180 paintings. The art took about a year or two to complete.

Gurney went to great effort to be as scientifically correct as possible. To complement this, the Norton exhibit even includes three fossil casts borrowed from the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Discovery and Science, including an Allosaurus claw.

“These allow us to tell another part of the story, and that is that Gurney has always been interested in the science behind his illustrations,” said Glenn Tomlinson. “He wants to make these dinosaurs as anatomically precise and correct as scholarship allows us to. He has worked a lot with the paleontologists.”

The artist also strived to make his work as lifelike as possible. For example, in an attempt to get human figures correct, he would gather his wife, his two children and the families of his New York neighborhood together for dress-up parties. They would pose for a painting or photo so that Gurney could be accurate in his representation of a Victorian-age look.

Before Gurney starts a painting, in order to create a more realistic world, he builds multiple homemade models and studies them ­to see, for example, how light would fall on a building.

As Gurney put it, “What I am trying to do with the Dinotopia pictures is make an imaginary world completely believable, where you can take it for granted.”
 

If you want to go

The exhibit Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney contains more than 50 original oil paintings from artist James Gurney’s Dinotopia book series. It also contains some pieces that show the artist’s process, like models and sketches, along with three dinosaur fossil casts.

When: The exhibit runs through Sept. 5. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays through Saturdays and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays. It’s closed on Mondays but stays open till 9 p.m. on the second Thursday of each month.

Where: Norton Museum of Art, 1451 S. Olive Ave., West Palm Beach, FL 33401

How much: Admission is $12 for adults over age 21, $5 for anyone age 13 through 21, and free to anyone under age 13. It’s also free to West Palm Beach residents (with proof of residency) every Saturday and free to Palm Beach County residents (with proof of residency) on the first Saturday of each month.

For more info, visit www.norton.org.