Edward Gorey and Ralph Steadman

Saipan has harbored some very creative people, but today we’re going to leave the Pacific entirely to look at a two creative luminaries from the Atlantic side of the ledger. These are the illustrators Edward Gorey, an American, and Ralph Steadman, an Englishman. The two have no association with each other, at least that I’m aware of, but they’ll share our attention in this space today.

So grab your zoris and your bowler, old chap; we’ll go to England first.

Before we board the Atlantic-bound boat, here’s a word from your kindly steward: I’m just a normal slob, not some sort of art critic. First of all, I don’t know anything about art. Moreover, I’m not a critic in any realm, art or otherwise; I just like writing about stuff that I like, or at least that subset of it that I think you might like, too. So I’m just sharing some appreciation here, not offering an expert eye.

But you can eyeball this stuff yourself if so interested, since the works of both of these artists, often in book form, are easily available on the Web.

Now that we’re en route to England, home of Ralph Steadman, I’ll note that there’s an American involved in this gig too, namely the late American writer Hunter S. Thompson, with whom Steadman collaborated.

One of my favorite Steadman works is a depiction of Hunter Thompson as a bat-winged animal skull flying over the desert. Thompson’s trademark cigarette holder is clutched in the skull’s teeth. This drawing is called “Spirit of Gonzo.”

I don’t want to push Steadman into Thompson’s shadow; Steadman’s work stands in its own limelight. But the collaboration is how many Americans, myself included, came to know of him.

In one of those fortuitous stories of great-talent-meets-great-talent, the two were a chance pairing for a magazine assignment in 1970 on the Kentucky Derby. Steadman also illustrated Thompson’s 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a work that’s certainly familiar to more than one Saipan resident.

I also ran across Steadman’s art in more recent times, when I noticed the label on an American brand of beer called Flying Dog. There’s no mistaking his unique style, so I bought the beer just because of the Steadman factor.

Mr. Steadman is still going strong and he’s very prolific.

We’ll now steer to the west side of the Atlantic, to Cape Cod, Mass., which was the home of illustrator Edward Gorey.

Gorey passed away in 2000, but his popularity abides among a very devoted fan base. And at the retail level, Gorey calendars and greeting cards seem to hit bookstore shelves every holiday season, at least in the bigger mainland stores.

Gorey’s art is, like Steadman’s, fantastic, as in “imaginative or fanciful.” But Gorey gets his effect by taking the opposite path of Steadman’s.

Steadman’s art, or at least the stuff I’ve seen, has the wild spirit of “Gonzo,” sort of a 1960s feel of almost psychedelic expansiveness. This is, after all, how you wind up with drawings of flying, bat-winged skulls that are smoking cigarettes.

But Gorey, by contrast, pulls you aground with a heavy blanket of gray and grinding Victorian gloom. Or maybe it’s called Gothic. Well, something like that. Anyway, it’s grim and shadowy and, more to the point, impishly creepy.

This might evoke notions of comic-book illustrations, but Gorey’s style isn’t cartoonish at all. His work has an intricate minimalism to it, which sounds like a weird combination of qualities, and it is weird, or, better stated, eccentric. Yeah, let’s go with that: eccentric.

I have seen some light-hearted and charming Gorey art, but his best known stuff has a darker breed of charm.

Gorey’s human figures are often pitiful in the extreme: threadbare waifs; dejected, woe-begotten adults; and doomed characters in macabre fairy tales that are like a mixture of Edgar Allen Poe and Dr. Seuss. It’s Gorey’s utterly deadpan delivery that makes his stuff so clever, self-mocking, and wry.

A good collection of Gorey material is the book Amphigorey: Fifteen Books, which lists for $15.25 at Amazon.

Well, this ends our trip to the Atlantic, so we’ll steer back to Saipan now. I hope you enjoyed the voyage. Hopefully you got to see some territory that you hadn’t seen before. That is, after all, the whole point of the trip.