Art for the ages: new murals offer a glimpse of the Pacific Coast's extinct ecosystems

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NH: You have a variety of styles--a realistic style, a sort of dreamscape style, a sci-fi style, and a cartoon style. What determined your rendering?

Stout: I tried to make everything consistent with a realistic yet Impressionistic style. The museum staff indicated a strong affection for California Impressionism, a genre represented in San Diego by such painters as Maurice Braun, Charles Arthur Fries, and Alfred R. Mitchell. I was also influenced by my favorite nineteenth-century landscape painter, Thomas Moran. He's a gigantic hero of mine. Not just because of his art, but because of the great impact he had on our entire country. It was his paintings that inspired the national park system and helped to create Yellowstone as our first national park.

NH: What was your major difficulty on the project?

Stout: When I was about two-thirds of the way through the murals, in October, 2006, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The museum had every right to take back the commission and have the murals finished by someone else. But they rallied around me like family and stuck by me. I had successful surgery a few months later, and a few months after that I went back to work and finished them. I'll always be grateful to the museum staff for their unflagging faith and support.

NH: Why was it so important to you to complete the mural commission yourself?.

Stout: I was also offered two other dream jobs at the same time--designing a movie about Edgar Rice Burroughs's fictional hero John Carter of Mars, and a children's television show. I wanted to do them all! But I asked myself, what's the first thing I do when I visit New York? I go to the American Museum of Natural History and look at the Charles R. Knight and William R. Leigh paintings. I knew from that answer I had to do the San Diego Natural History Museum's prehistoric murals as my own artistic and scientific legacy, one that will hopefully live on and inspire long after I'm gone.

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Contributing Editor Richard Milner, an associate in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, has written on Darwin, evolution, and paleoart, and has performed his one-man musical, Charles Darwin: Live & In Concert, worldwide. His new book, Darwin's Universe: Evolution from A to Z, will be published early next year by the University of California Press.

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