Hm… gotta find something to write about…

So, Edward Gorey has come up in conversation a lot in the last few months. And a few times over the past seven years. It’s all part of doing pen and ink work, weird pen and ink work at that. Everyone has to talk about him at one point or another.

It may seem odd, given my choice of media, to admit that I discovered Gorey rather late in my artistic development. Beyond that PBS Mystery opening credit thing that I saw as a kid, I didn’t really look at any of his work, in or out of context, until I was twenty-five and the only reason I took an interest in his illustrations was because the cute girl I wanted to ask out was into his work. I think that at least 93.2% of my decisions are based upon what cute girls think I should do. A cute girl got me to move to New Jersey and a cute girl told me that I'd be great at writing children's books. Likewise, in 9th grade, Lisa Harling told me that I looked better with my glasses on, so I stopped being that weird kid who only put his glasses on to read the chalk board (yes, we still had chalk boards in the early 1990’s) only to hide them while walking the halls. She also got me ride my first rollercoaster. I’m sort of certain that if I bumped into her on the street tomorrow and she suggested that I take my skilz to Thunderdome and battle it out with some armor wearing behemoth, I’d start wrapping my knuckles in rope, dip them in honey and shards of broken glass and shadow-box my way to Bartertown. Ah, Lisa Harling. Where was I? Oh yeah, Edward Gorey. So I read all of his stuff. And as much as I loved his illustrations, I found that his text left a bad taste in my mouth. Obviously the guy was brilliant, I wouldn’t say otherwise, but I couldn’t get into his macabre love of violence, even if it was merely ironic or darkly humored. I know that sounds weird given the rather dark settings I choose for my work, but the difference is that for me, violence is a sad but accurate facet of history, whereas, Gorey uses it for entertainment. I’m always leery of violence as entertainment and his writing style didn’t fit my personality: with the notable exception of The Ghastlycrumb Tinies, which is brilliant but being an ABC book at heart, isn’t quite as Gorey-esque as the rest of his oeuvre. I think that’s why it’s his most commercially successful title.

At any rate, things didn’t work out with the girl (not Lisa Harling but the other girl, though things didn’t work out with Lisa either) and I put Gorey into that part of my brain full of random art nonsense. Three years later, I was working on my first book. I chose pen and ink because it was cheap and reproduced well. I chose black and white because I thought I’d have to print it myself and, being poor, kept it simple. I never really thought about Gorey or his work. I stole liberally from Andrew Wyeth and 14th century Japanese painting, well, Andrew Wyeth stole from the Japanese long before I was born, but whatever.

As the years passed, I’ve run into countless people who ask me how much of an influence Edward Gorey is to my work and I always feel kind of bad to say not very much. But I have learned something from him over the last seven years, something that only came from working exclusively in monochromatic pen and ink and it’s something that’s been at the forefront of my mind the last few months: work small, work fast. That may not sound like much, but it’s a simple philosophy that opens up all sorts of creative opportunities for the detail oriented, faux OCD, pen and ink artist. Working small is a tough one. I’ve made some pretty big pen and ink drawings and they were pretty kick-ass but they took forever to finish. And that’s where the work fast part comes in. If you work small, you can cram as much or as little detail into a piece as you want and still get it done in a few hours or few days. The idea being, that if you get a whole lot of small, quickly rendered illustrations done in a short period of time, you’ve produced something that can go somewhere, be it to a publisher or online or etc. If the goal is to get your work “out there,” then it pays to get it done and out there. Or, by working small and fast, you can do a lot of work on a project and see if it all functions the way it needs to. If it does, then it won’t take long to finish it and send it off into the world. If it doesn’t, then it’s not hard to start over and get things right. Like I said, it’s pretty simple stuff, however, it’s phenomenally useful in taking a project from an idea to completion. It’s just another part of the ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ philosophy that allows me to make deceptively complex books with extremely difficult subjects. So, I guess I owe Edward Gorey some props for teaching me that one… from beyond the grave… ooooo! Ooooo!