We Ditched Art School, Hopped the Freights and Wrote a Book

James Gurney shares the story of his friendship with American painter Thomas Kinkade

- JAMES GURNEY

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 a bold plan to drop out of school for a while, hop on a freight train and discover America, documenting everything in our sketchbooks. Our heroes were Lewis and Clark, John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac. My mother was so terrified of the fate that might befall me (her brother was killed by a freight train) that she took out a life insurance policy on me. On September 16, 1980, a friend dropped us off at the Los Angeles freight yard. We spotted a boxcar with an open door, threw our backpacks into it, climbed aboard and sat in the shadows waiting for the train to start rolling east.

James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade in 1981.

I first met Tom Kinkade four years earlier, when he was assigned as my freshman college roommate at UC Berkeley. During the time I knew him he was painting gritty urban scenes and “street people.” The print business, with its glowing cottages, came later. We saw ourselves as restless Bohemians, called each other “Jackson” and invented a secret language that only we understood so we could comment freely in public. We concocted the train riding idea after we met a guy named Bud at a freight yard in Los Angeles. He told us which train cars to ride and where to catch them.