What if the best part of art is asking questions?

The important stuff is what’s left after you’ve explained everything else

Edward Gorey’s character, Figbash, striking some balletic poses. Source: the Edward Gorey House website

“My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what the world is like.”

~ Edward Gorey

It would be nice if life was safe and certain.

Or would it?

As I was typing ideas for this letter into my Notes app, damn autocorrect kept trying to “fix” my words. The little bot inside my phone argued with me over each unfamiliar word, repeatedly replacing what I had typed with something it felt was more appropriate. Eventually I had to manually override each “helpful suggestion” while hissing under my breath, “No. That’s not the word I want. THIS is the word I want, you stupid, stupid machine.”

Even though I was annoyed about being made to debate my intentions with an artificial (and rather uppity) grammarian, I took some small comfort in knowing my brain was full of words the computer didn’t understand and couldn’t predict.

Who wants to be predictable?

I recently finished listening to Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Genius and Mysterious Life of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery whose author website describes the book as, “the definitive biography of the artist, writer, playwright, and legendary eccentric Edward Gorey, master of gothic nonsense and macabre camp.”

Gorey was anything but predictable.

I discovered Born to Be Posthumous via

Chris Riddell

, who hosted a BBC Sunday Feature to celebrate Gorey's centenary year. Sadly, Mr. Gorey is no longer with us, having suffered a fatal heart attack in April, 2000. But his art lives on.

Gorey’s books are not what you would call mainstream, but they do inspire a bit of a cult following. Even if you are not yet a fan, you may have seen his work in the opening credits of PBS’s Masterpiece presentation, Mystery.

I have been peripherally aware of Gorey’s work for most of my life — enough so that I could identify his illustrations and recognize his name. Beyond that I knew very little about the man or his artistic vision. I assumed, for instance, that he was British. He was not. Despite my lack of intimate knowledge about either the artist or his creations, Gorey’s art lingered in my mind like some kind of pen-and-ink haunting.

I just adore this image of another Edward Gorey drawing - Figbash at it again. Source: Goreyana Blog

Having spent a fair amount of time in Gorey’s world — the BBC Sunday feature, the biography, and then a podcast episode or two (I tend to go for the full deep dive once my interest is piqued) — I started to wonder what exactly it is about his art that makes me feel a little spark whenever I encounter it in the wild.

The man was — as any art aficionado will tell you — a master of his craft. His incredibly expressive line work, painstaking crosshatching, endlessly detailed patterns, flawless compositions, and unique hand lettering remain largely unrivaled decades after his first illustrated book (the first of 116 and an early precursor of the graphic novel), The Unstrung Harp, arrived on the scene in 1953.

But while I know enough about art to appreciate the man’s skills, his extreme competence isn’t why images from his books live rent free in my head.

It’s more than just the images that take up space in my brain. It’s Gorey’s whole aesthetic and the worldview reflected in his images and stories. He has influenced many contemporary artists including Guillermo Del Toro, Maurice Sendak, Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), Alison Bechdel, Anna Sui, and Tim Burton, just to name a few.

Another Edward Gorey illustration. Aren’t you just dying to know the story behind this one? Source: The Edward Gorey House website

Like these artists, I find many aspects of Gorey’s work appealing. The man was undeniably an Anglophile, which is a label I could apply to myself when it comes to certain literature and landscapes. His characters live in a beautiful, if dark and dangerous, world based on romantic notions of the Victorian and Edwardian ages as well as — on occasion and without explanation — the Roaring Twenties. And while I don’t consider myself either goth or a lover of horror, I am drawn to stories with a supernatural bent.

From the biography, I also learned that Gorey and I share some interests and passions including a love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an interest in Taoism and animism, collecting rocks (like, a LOT of rocks), and adoring cats.

All of this is cool, but it still doesn’t explain why Gorey’s creations have, despite having only the briefest of encounters with my consciousness, left such an indelible mark on my psyche.

Edward Gorey illustration. Source: The Edward Gorey House website

And then I visited the website of The Edward Gorey House, “a museum, dedicated to Gorey’s life and work and his devotion to animal welfare.” I read about the current exhibit, Concealing the Art: Edward Gorey’s Mysterious Messages. The landing page for the exhibition closes with this:

“As a practitioner of Nonsense Literature, a card-carrying Surrealist, and an iconoclastic Dadaist, Gorey tends to sway his work toward both higher truths and underlying chaos. While he might be sending us on wild goose chases, the act of seeking out mysterious messages frequently triggers encounters with our own strange revelations and cosmic shoulder taps.”

Higher truths … underlying chaos … mysterious messages … revelations and cosmic shoulder taps. This combination of elements resonates more deeply than impecable draftsmanship or shared interests.

Earlier on that page, the curators of the show set the proverbial stage by explaining their take on why Gorey’s work has fascinated so many for so long,

“Aside from their sheer beauty, Gorey’s works have endured and continually engaged his readers for so long because they invite so many interpretations—and misinterpretations. As far as Gorey is concerned, everyone is right to some extent; and, at the same time, utterly clueless.”

We often look to art to give us answers to life’s big questions, but Gorey’s art refuses to oblige. Instead, his art is full of unanswered — and possibly unanswerable — questions.

Answers are closed. They define and constrain.

Questions are open. They invite and encourage.

There may be comfort in the certainty of having answers, but the more answers you have, the smaller and less magical your world becomes. And the fact is, there is so much we will never know. We can live in fear of that reality, or we can embrace the beautiful chaos and possibility of a world full of things we don’t fully understand.

Gorey clearly took inspiration from the artists of the Dadaist and subsequent Surrealist movement.

An article published by the Tate Gallery defines Surrealism as:

“Surrealism aims to revolutionise human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional. At the core of their work is the willingness to challenge imposed values and norms, and a search for freedom.”

Well, THAT resonates.

It also reminds me that two of my favorite artists are Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, both women Surrealist painters. And, looking at their work next to Gorey’s, I can see there is a throughline of mystery, the unknown, something rather unsettling. These elements are more obvious in the work of Carrington and Varo, of course, but there are echoes and shadows of them in Gorey’s illustrations.

I think that’s the thing that draws me in, the thing that whispers to me to come a little closer, look a little deeper, and ask questions even if I know I’ll never find any answers. There is something exhilerating and freeing about admitting how much we just don’t know.

I am so glad I was inspired to take some time to get to know Mr. Gorey and his work a bit better. Tumbling down this particular rabbit hole may not have answered any of life’s pressing questions, but it did give me a few tantalizing clues about further explorations that might help me know myself better.

I’ll leave you with one more Gorey-ism to ponder, from Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey:

“Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.” ~ Edward Gorey