Edward Gorey is a hundred this February, or would be if he wasn’t 25 years dead.
To celebrate the one hundred years since Edward Gorey’s birth, Linda Hughes and Andrew Baker are curating an exhibition in Edinburgh of artists’ work which, I imagine, will reflect somehow on his influence.
I’m thinking what this means as they have asked me to take part and submit a piece for the show.
The difference between when an artist and a curator organise an exhibition, is the artist picks the person and the curator picks precisely which piece of work they want. So the degree of expectation each has for the way it will turn out – for the look of their respective shows – belong to different orders of certainty.
Linda and Andrew are artist illustrators, so the onus is on us (the people they’ve picked!) to come up with the goods.
Gorey only made one trip abroad. To Scotland. Otherwise he never left the U.S. You could say all of Gorey’s drawings look as though they are set in Scotland. We don’t see New York City in ’em. Not the place but the characters of NYC, some extreme and eccentric folk, those we do find. Flamboyant in costume or withdrawn and wan in black, in his drawing they all are transposed into another environment; to his idea of a Scottish Laird’s lair, castle and moorland. Perhaps he had to leave Manhattan, go to check it out for real, match his imaginings against nature, who knows?
I know that doesn’t help me much with thinking about what to make for this exhibition. Unlike more than a few people I know, I’m not a Gorey obsessive. I’ve bought his books and enjoyed his mordant line in black humour since student days but never studied it for its secrets. Not in the same way I draw from other artists. What then is my take-away? If Edward Gorey has not had a profound influence on me in the past how do I now turn my appreciation into an artifact?
In the shallowest way, by taking up his materials, not even his technique, pen and ink, and run with that.
It’s been ages since I’ve got busy with a dip pen. And where I’ve gone is as far away from my habitual way of working as I can think of. Which isn’t very far.
Cross-hatching. It’s careful, and sometimes not-so-careful, line work. Straight lines, this way and that, without expression, with no feeling, well there’s some of course, but the pressure, direction and amount of ink on the nib along with the speed of the pen stroke is all I need concern myself with.
That’s all the while I’m physically drawing, when I stand back and consider what’s happened and what’s to do next – thinking gets a little more complex.
Before I go there, it occurred to me while covering an area with parallel lines, where you can’t see the visual effect of what you’re doing until afterwards when you’ve completed that section, that it has an affinity with some early Flemish, definitely Classical Florentine, oil painting. This is where careful drawing is coloured, one bit at a time, say chin to cheek by mixing the range of colours, cool to warm, on the palette first. Then, once you’ve got that right (made the blend of colours with the gradation as you want) with a soft brush transfer them, without thinking of anything else, into their place on the drawing.
That’s what I’ve wound up doing, drawing a composition and filling it in. Went abstract to begin with. Free and open, I like it better not knowing at the outset how the picture will take shape. And the way they look when they do (take shape)…., no, they’re not going to make a link, else it’s a pretty tenuous one, back to Mr Gorey. A better connection would be to turn some of my figurative paintings into black & white line drawings. Yes, that might do the trick. It hasn’t, yet, at least to my liking.
The thing is, it’s very easy to make bits of the drawing too heavy when all the tones are made with line. It’s a technique derived from engraving and block printing. With etching we can use aquatint for broad areas of tone. In the same way I could do a similar thing here and, instead of only using a pen, I could simply dilute the ink and brush a wash onto the drawing to make flat areas of easy on the eye grey.
And do without the hours of scratching and fuss of bodging it (unless I’m very careful, precise and tiny in my mark-making).
I’m learning but I’m not sure that being so stubborn about sticking to line – straight lines – is bringing results worth the bother, but we’ll see. Another week before I decide what to send.
Every day a different development
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