EDWARD GOREY: "OBSESSED WITH LANDSCAPE"
Gorey told the interviewer Simon Henwood that he was “really quite obsessed with landscape” but didn’t “know how to deal with it.” That's bosh. In _Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey_ (pre-order now at https://books.google.com/books?id=hx6...), I take a close look at the landscapes in his work, pointing out just how beautifully handled they are.
Just look at the backgrounds on the covers he illustrated for Doubleday Anchor paperbacks in the '50s, many of which are really foregrounds in terms of their visual interest: the lunar desolation on Charles Doughty's _Travels in Arabia Deserta_, the lone traveler on the road snaking into a vaguely disquieting forest on Alain-Fournier’s _The Wanderer_. Think, too, of the exquisitely limned landscapes in Gorey titles such as _The Object-Lesson_ (1958), where the spidery trees clawing at the sky recall Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints but also Arthur Rackham's spooky Wild Wood in his pen-and-ink drawings for _Wind in the Willows_. Think, finally, of Gorey's susceptibility to landscape in movies like Feuillade's silent classic _Tih Minh_ (1918), whose location footage of "absolutely desolate mountain landscapes of rock and scrub outside Nice with the sea in the distance" flickered in his dreams forever, though he only saw the movie once, at a rare screening at MOMA in 1969. And let's not forget his raptures over _I Know Where I'm Going!_ (1945), a gothic romance by the British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger whose location shots of the craggy, storm-lashed Scottish Isle of Mull so captured Gorey's heart that he--an inveterate homebody with a horror of travel--made a pilgrimage to the islands off the west coast of Scotland to take in their lonely, windswept beauty firsthand.
Of course, as I also note in BTBP, "Gorey’s landscapes are highly stylized, like the Japanese woodcuts he admired. 'I’ve never really attempted to create any form from nature,' he said. 'I often think, ‘Oh, wouldn’t this vista make a lovely landscape drawing.’ But I wouldn’t dream of attempting it.'”
Yet we should always be wary of such sweeping statements because just when we think we have Gorey pegged, he upends our assumptions. Consider the boulder that provides a suitable perch for the chap in tweeds in _The Object-Lesson_, on the page captioned "It now became apparent (despite the lack of library paste." Given Gorey's comments on his hopeless ineptitude at realistic landscapes and his insistence that he never drew from life, we can safely assume it's his Platonic ideal of a big rock, excavated from his imagination.
Or can we? Leafing through the photos taken on the Cape by Gorey's cousin Eleanor Garvey, we see--what's this? A dead ringer for the boulder in _The Object-Lesson_! As Ken Morton, Gorey's first cousin once removed, confirms, it's almost certainly a fastidious copy of the "glacial erratic" Gorey and his cousins saw on their Fort Hill walks in Eastham, on the Cape, and which Eleanor captured in a 1966 snap.
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https://www.facebook.com/markderywrit...
Just look at the backgrounds on the covers he illustrated for Doubleday Anchor paperbacks in the '50s, many of which are really foregrounds in terms of their visual interest: the lunar desolation on Charles Doughty's _Travels in Arabia Deserta_, the lone traveler on the road snaking into a vaguely disquieting forest on Alain-Fournier’s _The Wanderer_. Think, too, of the exquisitely limned landscapes in Gorey titles such as _The Object-Lesson_ (1958), where the spidery trees clawing at the sky recall Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints but also Arthur Rackham's spooky Wild Wood in his pen-and-ink drawings for _Wind in the Willows_. Think, finally, of Gorey's susceptibility to landscape in movies like Feuillade's silent classic _Tih Minh_ (1918), whose location footage of "absolutely desolate mountain landscapes of rock and scrub outside Nice with the sea in the distance" flickered in his dreams forever, though he only saw the movie once, at a rare screening at MOMA in 1969. And let's not forget his raptures over _I Know Where I'm Going!_ (1945), a gothic romance by the British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger whose location shots of the craggy, storm-lashed Scottish Isle of Mull so captured Gorey's heart that he--an inveterate homebody with a horror of travel--made a pilgrimage to the islands off the west coast of Scotland to take in their lonely, windswept beauty firsthand.
Of course, as I also note in BTBP, "Gorey’s landscapes are highly stylized, like the Japanese woodcuts he admired. 'I’ve never really attempted to create any form from nature,' he said. 'I often think, ‘Oh, wouldn’t this vista make a lovely landscape drawing.’ But I wouldn’t dream of attempting it.'”
Yet we should always be wary of such sweeping statements because just when we think we have Gorey pegged, he upends our assumptions. Consider the boulder that provides a suitable perch for the chap in tweeds in _The Object-Lesson_, on the page captioned "It now became apparent (despite the lack of library paste." Given Gorey's comments on his hopeless ineptitude at realistic landscapes and his insistence that he never drew from life, we can safely assume it's his Platonic ideal of a big rock, excavated from his imagination.
Or can we? Leafing through the photos taken on the Cape by Gorey's cousin Eleanor Garvey, we see--what's this? A dead ringer for the boulder in _The Object-Lesson_! As Ken Morton, Gorey's first cousin once removed, confirms, it's almost certainly a fastidious copy of the "glacial erratic" Gorey and his cousins saw on their Fort Hill walks in Eastham, on the Cape, and which Eleanor captured in a 1966 snap.
https://www.facebook.com/markderywrit...
https://www.facebook.com/markderywrit...
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