Sunday, October 2, 2011

edward gorey





i don't know what the protocol is for reposting things from other blogs. below is an excerpt from a blog. if you want to see it all, here is the link. i'm guessing they would appreciate it if you went out and bought the book. edward gorey's great simple theory about art (see below) is everything i have ever thought but couldn't put into words. i would have just said, *yin-yang.*

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/09/15/floating-world-edward-gorey-letters/

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Today, Neumeyer is opening the treasure trove of this fascinating, never-before-published correspondence in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer — a magnificent collection of 75 typewriter-transcribed letters, 38 stunningly illustrated envelopes, and more than 60 postcards and illustrations exchanged between two collaborators-turned-close-friends, featuring Gorey’s his witty, wise meditations on such eclectic topics as insect life, the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, and Japanese art.Equally fascinating is the unlikely story of how Gorey and Neumeyer met in the first place — a story involving a hospital waiting room, a watercolor of a housefly, and a one-and-a-half-inch scrap of paper with a dot — and the affectionate friendship into which it unfolded.
There’s a remarkable hue to Gorey’s writing, a kind of thinking-big-thoughts-without-taking-oneself-too-seriously quality. In September of 1968, in what he jokingly termed “E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art,” Gorey wrote these Yodaesque words:
This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.”

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