Winterfest Interview with Jamie Murray
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Winterfest Interview with Jamie Murray |
| Interviewer: | Winterfest |
| Interviewee: | Jamie Murray |
| Date(s): | 2005 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Beauty and the Beast |
| External Links: | Jamie Murray interview, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
In 2005, Jamie Murray was interviewed for Winterfest. It includes lots of art!
See Winterfest Interview Series.
Some Excerpts
If you’ve ever been to a general scifi convention, you know there’s a lot of fandom crossover – STAR TREK fans like STAR WARS, BatB fans like X-FILES, etc.
In ‘93 I was a guest at an international STAR TREK con and there were some BatB fans there. They came up to me and said that my “beast” character would fit in nicely in the BatB world, and, “by the way, there’s going to be a BatB con nearby in the next few weeks, you should go...” I had a free weekend and, at the time was trying to do as many con artshows as possible, so I went to the ‘93 con in Austin, and the rest is history!
The same way I would pick a subject for any piece I did, be it BatB, science fiction, or a personal portrait of a model I had photographed – I would flip through reference photos quickly, just glancing, not looking, and suddenly I’d look at one and I’d “see” a finished painting.
Rarely would I come up with an idea first and try to make a reference fit it {except for “the B-Files”. I always felt a beast character living with people underground fit into the X-Files world and I knew I had to do a crossover piece!}.
I’m a copy hack, always using reference photos... if you’re doing portraits of recognizable figures, you HAVE to use reference. Unfortunately, it’s only been the last few years that high quality screen grabs could be done with enough detail to use as reference, so I had to scour magazines and such for pics to use.
Every artist will have moments where things aren’t going right. That’s when you put down the brush, walk away, and clear your head. But any real problems I had were technical... the character problems are worked out in the layout phase.
Linda Hamilton has a stunning, unique face, and it’s very hard to get it right. Patrick Stewart of STAR TREK also has a unique bone structure that’s hard to get right. But you work all that out in sketches before you start work on laying color.
Some paintings might not “click” in my brain 100%, so things move at a slow pace, or develop completely different than how it was originally envisioned... then there are other pieces that just have that “spark” and everything falls into place magically – “Twins at Birth?” was like that. No matter where I went as Myhr, there were people who thought I was trying to do Vincent. I couldn’t explain the differences as well as I could paint the differences, so I did a portrait of the two together. It was such a fun concept, that I was chuckling as I painted it. It flowed out onto the paper... it was the quickest painting I’d ever done – all together, it probably took 8 hours {a normal paint time would be double that}.
There were people posting my schtuff online without permission, and lots of times it looked bad, so I figured if it was going to be online, I might as well have some control of the quality... Again, it boiled down to quality presentation. If my work looked bad online, viewers who hadn’t seen the work before might think that it was painted poorly.
I started playing with makeup effects back in the mid-80s and created a lion man character for Halloween {based on the old “Island of Dr Moreau” movie}. Since I work in television, we used the character to host STAR TREK marathons on our station. One of the producer/directors had come up with the name, a derivation of my last name, Murray.
Local Star Trek fans invited me to appear at local Trek cons and it took off from there. BatB fans were at a big Trek con and told me I HAD to go to the next BatB con... since I had the weekend free, I went to the ‘93 con in Austin, a 3 hour drive away. Murry fit in and immediately got adopted by the BatB fans, and was asked to appear at the annual BatB cons.