Early Life
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.
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