Edward Gorey
Gorey, who died in April 2000 at the age of 75, was known for often macabre drawings and picture-stories which gained him a worldwide cult following. Gorey’s work inspired a wide range of current artists from the film director Tim Burton to the lead animator of South Park. He is most famous for his self illustrated books frequently depicting children or other hapless victims succumbing to undeserved deaths.
Work and influences
As well as his own picture story books, the Chicago-born artist illustrated worked on books by authors including Samuel Beckett,TS Eliot,Edward lear and Muriel spark as well as drawing new pictures for Aesop’s fables and the Brer Rabbit stories
Gorey was widely considered to be an eccentric throughout his life and in the 25 years between 1957 and 1982 he did not miss a performance by the New York City Ballet, attending in an outfit consisting of an enormous fur coat and white tennis shoes, he also lived alone his entire life never forming relationships except for friends and his many cats.
He also worked on Broadway and his melodramatically sinister sets and costumes for the 1977 production of Dracula netted him one of the few awards he received in his lifetime, the Tony awards for costume design. Gorey wrote more than 100 books and illustrated reprints of books such as Dracular by Bram stoker, The War of the world by H.G.Wells,and a collection of whimsical poems Old possum Book of Practical Cats titled by T. S. Eliot, another cat aficionado.
The Gorey Truth
Gorey was born in 1925 but it was in the 1940s when he first started to produce his serious work and so as an artist at Harvard University he avoided the draft to war. At the same time fellow artist of the macabre Charles Addams started to post his own slice of the evil in The New Yorker, The Addams family which was inspired by similar influences as Gorey.
Edward’s poisonously funny little picture books, deadpan accounts of murder, disaster and discreet depravity, narrated in a voice that affects the world-weary tone of British novelists like Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton -Burnett,Established him as the master of high-camp macabre.
Books
One of his more successful books, was the The Gashlycrumb Tinies: or, After the Outing which is an abecedarian book written by Edward Gorey that was first published in 1963. Gorey tells the tale of 26 children (each representing a letter of the alphabet) and their untimely deaths in rhyming dactylic couplets, accompanied by the author’s distinctive black and white illustrations. It is one of his best known books and is the most notorious amongst his roughly half-dozen mock alphabets. It has been described as a “sarcastic rebellion against a view of childhood that is sunny, idyllic, and instructive”. The morbid humor of the book comes in part from the mundane ways in which children die, such as falling down the stairs or choking on a peach. Far from illustrating the dramatic and fantastical childhood nightmares, these scenarios instead poke fun at the banal paranoia that come as a part of parenting.
After looking at his work i feel this has help me get a better understanding of his work and style especially these story board which i find very fascinating and is something that i would like to do in my work possibly going out and forming a story board relating to my two min videos.
Illustration style
His work often old in verse and illustrated in a style that crosses Surrealism with the Victorian true-crime gazette, are set in some unmistakably British place, in a time that is vaguely Victorian, Edwardian and Jazz Age all at once. however Gorey’s work has never gone out of style, and that probably has a little something to do with the fact that “goth never truly dies, Though the subculture first picked up steam in the waning days of late-1970s punk, those of us who weren’t old enough to catch Bauhaus at the Batcave had two early cultural touchstones that pointed us toward the dark side: Winona Ryder’s “strange and unusual” Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice, and the PBS seriesMasterpiece Mystery!, perhaps the darkest show it was possible to encounter if your parents forgot to turn off PBS after Sesame Street.
Influences on other artists
Gorey illustrations are even becoming voguish as tattoos. Last year the ninth-season “American Idol” finalist Siobhan Magnus had a biceps tattoo of Death playing nanny to a flock of soon-to-be-doomed children, from “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” Gorey’s grimly funny alphabet book.
Even fashion designers see Gorey’s anachronistic use of historical references as perfect for our age of mash-ups and remixes. The neo-Victorian couturier Kambriel,whose shows have featured Gorey-inspired sets and models reciting Gorey limericks, said that in her designs, as in Gorey’s tales, “the propriety of the past is infused with the playful mischief and irreverence of the present.”
Even a more established designer like Anna Sui has drawn inspiration from him. “My big attraction to Edward Gorey is that he picked up on all those cultures and was inspired by them but kind of spun them in his own brain and made his own world,” she said.
Gorey was an early adopter of this sensibility. At Harvard from 1946 to ’50, where he roomed with the poet Frank Ohara , Gorey borrowed a page from the bourgeois-mocking wit of writers like Firbank and Oscar Wilde to create a deadpan, ironic worldview, one that appears strikingly contemporary in retrospect. Gorey has gone on record stating that he was influenced by the works of Edward Lear,Lewis Carol,Agatha Christie and Charles dickens and among many others.
Such historically minded analyses can lose sight of the straightforward delights of Gorey’s art, his astonishing draftsmanship and pitch-perfect composition, informed by a lifelong love of film, theater and ballet. Many of the images “look like theater sets, so there’s that dramatic appeal to it. They’re very well composed, easy to read, yet there’s enough detail in them that every time you look at them you’ll see something you hadn’t seen before.
Intriguingly, explanations for the mounting popularity of Gorey’s art rarely touch on its air of hidden, maybe even unknowable meaning. Whatever Gorey’s work appears to be about, it’s forever insinuating, in its poker-faced way, that it’s really, truly about something else. As Edward Lear, one of Gorey’s major influences, might have said it is this very elusiveness, the sense that meaning can never be pinned down by language, that is Gorey’s overarching point.
That versatility is one of the most interesting things about Gorey. While today we associate him with macabre commonplaces like “B is for Basil assaulted by bears” or remember him as one of the names on the bookshelf of your high school chum who wore black lipstick and introduced you to Joy Division, he was also quite highbrow in both his work and personal tastes, and found critical success throughout his career for more Surrealist-minded works like The Object-Lesson, which was inspired by Samuel Foote’s poem, “The Grand Panjandrum,” and Japanese Haiku.
Japanese Haiku.
The mostly self-taught Gorey had a unique imagination, and he exercised it in his works. Looking at some of his darkly comical and sometimes downright homicidal works, it’s clear he shared much with contemporaries like Jim Henson and Shel Silverstein. Their work was often nominally geared toward a younger audience, but appealed to an older crowd.
Links into other genres
Legendary film maker David Lynch is a self confessed fan of Gorey’s dark humor which is quite evident in his breakthrough film Eraser head.
David Lynch’s Lost Highways commissioned a music video directed by filmmaker Mark Romanek which was directly styled on the art of Edward Gorey. Romanek stated he wanted the video to hold the Gorey’s aesthetic and lifted much of his work directly from the page to the screen.
The Art of Edward Gorey
These beautiful illustration are really something from another world.
The Gorey Stuff (he influenced)
Tim Burton
Neil Gaiman
Henry selick
Ogdred weary
After researching into Edward Gorey and looking at these other famous animators works you can tell how they have been influenced heavily the drawing ,setting and environment gives that Edward Gorey effect you would be a fool not to believe it.
Edward Gorey created greeting cards and illustrations, his mainly created books, Gorey’s work was on the dark side to say the least, he rhymes about accidents that children get themselves into and makes them fun to enjoy. The books he creates are witty but and I do enjoy his humor in his books very much. His drawings mostly drawn in grey scale are my favorite I did not want to use this style for my own book but would like to use him as inspiration another time hopefully.
sham988 