The Animal’s Address: Five illustrators draw animals with a home and a habit
Prologue: Giving creatures somewhere to live
Gurney gives dinosaurs a city and a map. Walker builds creatures as objects with wheels and bone. Penaud lets geese speak in the manner of old fables. Tono places rabbits in a forest and cats under a lamp. Nishimura draws bears on a path and animal customers in a store.
I. James Gurney — A city before the book
The city was painted before the book had a shore to set it on. On 31 May 2020, James Gurney wrote that he had first painted a city built on a waterfall around 1981, and again in 1988, and that the panoramic painting was the first image to become part of Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time. It was already a place: water, stone, and a town where a person could imagine walking.
On his own site he traces the preparation. Research for paintings of ancient life, across more than a dozen assignments for National Geographic, including reconstructions of Moche, Kushite, and Etruscan civilizations, led to lost-world pictures. “Dinosaur Parade” and “Waterfall City” are the two he names. He gave two years to writing and illustrating the book. Turner published it in 1992.
The city is assembled from ground he had already drawn. In that May 2020 post he said it combined Italian hill towns, seen on a National Geographic assignment, with Niagara Falls, which he had painted from Goat Island before the large canvas. In an interview first published on 14 April 2013 he set the same debt in Venice: much of Waterfall City was based on sketches made there.
“The outer eye feeds the inner eye.”
Observational work, he said, builds the vocabulary of an imaginative picture. You draw the ground you can stand on. Then you are free to move it.
On 19 June 2023 he named another piece of ground as the breakthrough: a relief map painted in oil, the sort of map the magazine work had made natural. He made the island large enough for deserts, jungles, and mountains, tried the names Panmundia, Belterra, and Saurotopia, and settled on Dinotopia, a portmanteau of dinosaur and utopia. Then he asked what the ground rules should be for a society of humans and dinosaurs.
Only creatures known from the fossil record would be included. Modern animals were out. Imaginary beings were out. Tyrannosaurs and trilobites might live there. Dogs, horses, and mermaids would not. He painted the dinosaurs to the science of that time, which did not yet give them feathers, and he wanted, without greatly changing how they looked, to give them not only sentience but sapience: personalities, and a limited ability to communicate, a few in human languages and others in whale-like musical languages that people would have to learn.
The same May 2020 post is plain about how the animals got their bodies. The earliest inklings of the idea, he wrote, came from brainstorms with archaeologists on National Geographic expeditions and with paleontologists at the Smithsonian. He consulted scientists on the outward form. When the story turned speculative — saurian writing was his example — those scientists, to his surprise, wanted to contribute ideas. He winces at pictures from twenty or thirty years ago, because new forms and new theories keep arriving.
On 11 November 2021 he said his most discerning readers were young people between 10 and 20, who miss nothing and can handle even the most abstruse philosophical or scientific ideas, and that he had wanted a visual book for them. He named Star Wars, Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings as worlds he loved for their completeness, and said he had tired of stories that put the good people on one side and the bad on the other and end in a fight.
“I wanted to believe it, but I couldn’t help wondering who grew the food for the orcs, or what the Stormtroopers did when they got off work.”
A reader of the May 2020 post offered a line from the books, “breathe deep, seek peace,” as a practice for conflict. Gurney did not add a motto. The world, he wrote, is always in need of a vision of people getting along and working things out, with each other and with the natural world.
Ambassador Bix, he wrote in that post, is “a combination of my chihuahua, my grandmother, and the Dalai Lama.” The 2023 post bars dogs from the island, with every other modern animal. The pet informs a temperament. The species on the island stay fossil species, and sapience is what he adds after the ground is drawn.
The four artists who follow work at a smaller scale. A species is given a dwelling the artist can point to, and a habit is allowed to happen there: speech, play, reading, fear, an errand. The face comes after the floor.
II. John Walker — Animals built as objects
John Walker builds the animal as an object that could have belonged to a household, and the materials say so. In 2022 he made a sculpture titled Rolling Rabirdt: epoxy clay, antique toy wheels, a wood base. He writes that it was inspired by the main subject of his painting Dream Into Reality Into Dream, and by antique pull toys. He does not define the compound name. What he specifies is the making. Wheels from a toy meant to be pulled, a base to stand on, clay for the body. A pull toy is built for a floor. It has a direction of travel. The creature is given that history of use.
He also makes objects for a culture he has invented, so the thing has a provenance. The Dankquart Collection, he writes, “combines a narrative framework with an expanding assemblage of feigned antiquities.” The idea began from the thought that we live in one universe among many. He invented Victor Dankquart — adventurer, raconteur, and quite possibly a con man — who claimed to have brought back a relic from a civilization long gone, a culture much like ours, but different. The first piece was Reliquary From a Lost Civilization: wood, acrylic, MDF board, composition gold leaf, metal, varnish, and animal bone. Other pieces may include cloth, polymer clay, and found objects. The bone is a material that once belonged to a body, set into an object that pretends to have been handled.
He imagines that some of the pieces “were used for storytelling.” An address, for an object, is the room and the hands. If the culture is feigned, the handling still has to be built.
On his drawings page, which carries a 2019 copyright line, he says drawing is his favorite way to make art: paper and pencil, an “acoustic version of a musical piece,” stripped of extra instrumentation. Among the titles are Rhino and Roses and Two Herons. He does not describe the sheets. The rose sits in the name with the animal, as the bone sits in the reliquary and the wheel sits in the sculpture.
III. Lucie Penaud — Geese allowed to speak
In June 2024 Lucie Penaud was asked whether chatter belongs only to humans. Kiblind had set her the theme “Bla Bla Bla,” and she had drawn a scarecrow and geese. The introduction of 21 June 2024 describes her comics as work that shows a great deal and speaks very little. The drawing reverses that proportion. A scarecrow is a human shape with nothing to say. Geese, in certain old stories, might have a great deal to say.
“I don’t know, but I like to imagine that it isn’t.”
Thinking about the picture, she had gone to Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’Oye, the Tales of Mother Goose, and to the fables of La Fontaine: “the kind of stories in which animals handle human language very well.” She borrows a permission those books already grant: animals who handle human speech, in a story that has bothered to give them a place. If her geese are speaking, the language stays with them.
Asked whom she would talk with, if the choice did not have to be rational, she said members of a non-human species. Perceptions radically different from ours, she said, could produce something incredible. She is not claiming to know what a goose sees. The picture is a chair left for that perception.
She was a student then, at the Haute école des arts du Rhin in Strasbourg. Her site now says she has graduated with a master’s degree in illustration from that school, with the jury’s congratulations, and that she is based in the Paris area. The copyright line reads 2026. Her comics, she told Kiblind, come at the page from the picture rather than from literature. Words arrive in small touches, to express a thought or to give a character a voice. What fascinates her most is the sequence of still images. Violet, she said, gives a composition its rhythm, and has something of the dream and the supernatural about it. Japanese prints and the Nabis taught her vivid color and how an image is built.
IV. Tono — Forest picnic and lamplight
Tono, an illustrator born and raised in Japan, described two pictures on 2 July 2025. One is a forest in spring. One is a circle of lamplight. In both, the animals are busy, and the place is particular enough to enter.
Since childhood she has loved animals and imaginary worlds. As an only child her greatest joy was drawing, and reading picture books and fairy tales. She has always been drawn to British and European culture: her parents once lived in places like London, and she grew up among her mother’s clothes and accessories from that time, so the rooms in the pictures have a household behind them. Her favorite things, she said, are quiet places, cats, art and books, and cocoa. She has never had a pet cat. A neighborhood cat used to visit her previous home every day, and it is her dream to live with one. That animal’s address was a doorstep. It came of its own accord.
Picnic Bunnies is a warm spring picnic in the forest: a mother rabbit and her children playing freely, a moment of peace and happiness. She wanted a soft but lively air, “as if birds were chirping gently in the quiet surroundings.” The flowers came from real small blossoms that bloom in spring. Kindness, she said, went into the mother’s expression and gestures, so that a family bond would read.
Bedtime Stories is the other hour.
“Under the warm glow of a lamp, two cats sit quietly, engrossed in reading a book.”
She wanted the scene mysterious and comforting, as if the viewer were being invited into stories and dreams. On the cover of the book the cats are reading, she drew a moon and tiny stars, a gate, she said, into dreams. On the back, a small kitten watches, and she left his next move open. The lamp was a problem of degree: a warm, serene light, not too bright and not too dim, so the room would feel calm enough to stay in. A lamp makes a room inside the dark. It tells you the time.
She works mainly in Procreate on an iPad and finishes in Photoshop. Soft brushes make the folds of clothing. Rougher brushes depict plants and trees, so the rabbits’ forest gets the rougher mark. The year before the interview she visited Beatrix Potter’s house in the Lake District. Potter, she said, is one of the authors who have influenced her most, and the small house and garden paths felt like stepping into a picture book. She believes the essence of what she makes is storytelling, and she still wants worlds like the books of her childhood.
V. Tsuchika Nishimura — Bears, bells, and errands
On 7 December 2023, Tsuchika Nishimura looked ten years back. In 2013 she had held her first solo exhibition, Kuma yoke no suzu, “Bear-Repelling Bell.” She drew people walking through a forest while ringing bells, and bears frightened by the sound.
She had always liked the nursery rhyme Mori no kuma-san. What she found almost too funny was that the most dangerous and frightening bear is the one who tells the human to run. The song gives the bear a warning to deliver. The exhibition gives the bear a forest, a bell, and a flinch.
She listed the faces people put on bears.
“A cute mascot, a ferocious monster, a victim of environmental destruction, a threat from nature: any number of faces are given to it, and still it cannot quite be caught. I don’t know what the bear itself thinks.”
The year of the post was full of bear news: the urban-bear problem, the culling of a bear called OSO18, and, that summer, an exhibition on bear hunting at a museum of hunting and nature in Paris. She felt faintly excited all year. Her about page says that from around 2020 she began doodling bears and still does. On 7 June 2026 she had drawn a ten-page manga titled Honma no kuma. In Kansai speech honma means truth or reality, beside standard hontō, so the title sits close to “a real bear.”
There is another building, and the customers are animals. Hokkyoku hyakkaten no konsheruju-san — the festival’s English path calls it The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store — is on her books page as a Shogakukan title: volume 1 in 2017, volume 2 in 2020, a special edition in 2023. A Japan Media Arts Festival page published on 16 February 2022 presents it as the Excellence Award in the manga division of the 25th edition. The summary puts a new concierge, Akino, in a department store where every customer is an animal. Some are extinct. They arrive with things to find and troubles to tell, and they ask the human staff for help. Customers dress for a department store, and the store is in the manner of Art Deco. The jury text signed by Sugimoto Bauwens Jessica says the animals are not merely cute: each has a personality, and a personhood that holds its own beside a human one. In that reading, extinct animals walk into a building that can stand for arrogant overconsumption, and they come with an ordinary errand. The store is the address. Asking for help is the habit.
Epilogue: Where the animal lives
An address is a place where a body already knows what to do next. The falls and the map come before a dinosaur is granted a mind. A wheel, a bone, a field, a lamp, and a forest path come before anyone asks the animal what it stands for.
If you draw, ask where this animal sleeps, eats, flinches, reads, or asks for help, and what you studied — a falls, a toy, a fable, a blossom, a year of news — before you gave it a face. If you are still learning, copy the place before the eyes. The eyes will borrow the room. If you have asked someone to make a picture for a purpose of yours, ask for the hour and the ground. An animal whose only job is to smile in your place has not been given a life. If you simply love a picture, stay with the part you could walk through.
Each of them has a page in the Index. You met the link when they entered. It is there when you want the rest of the person. This was only the order of the work. Place, then habit, then the living body that keeps both. Go and look. The animals are busy. They were given somewhere to be.
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