Tag Archives: interviews

The Art of Nordic Folklore: Jørgen Bech Pedersen

December 21, 2015 greydogtales 2 Comments

After our recent South American adventure, we lurch surprisingly north. Come with us now to Scandinavia and see the work of Danish artist, Jørgen Bech Pedersen, who produces terrific interpretations of those dark creatures which skulk in Nordic folk-lore.

greydog’s own introduction to Nordic folklore, decades ago, was through many un-related sources: the Marvel Thor comics (not always accurate, funnily enough), bits of Alan Garner‘s Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and Jacqueline Simpson‘s marvellous book Icelandic Folktales and Legends.

Living in a small community by the North Sea, we had a natural feel for those stories. Seal rocks at the bottom of the cliffs – were those really only seals down there? And what actually came in with the sea-frets which washed over the fields? Our ruined chalk farmhouses weren’t so far from those of folklore books, after all.

When we moved inland, years later, other Yorkshire folk would say that our accent was half Danish. So it was a pleasure to discover the work of ‘Bech‘, who agreed to be interviewed for this very programme (all paintings/drawings should be clickable for a larger version, by the way)…

greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, Jørgen – you are our first Scandinavian guest! We initially noticed your work on-line through your bestiary of troldfolk. Is your involvement in folklore a recent thing, or something from your youth?

jørgen: My fascination with folklore is a recent thing that started about 8 years ago. But I guess it really began in my childhood as a fascination for fantasy and fairy tales. At some point I discovered Dungeons & Dragons which further sparked my fascination. But I was aware of the difference between the elves depicted in popular culture and the ones I’d heard about in folk tales. I remember always wondering : why do Danish elves have a hollow back? I had also heard H C Andersen’s fairy tale The Elfin Hill in which the hill opens up and the elves pour out of it. But how?

These questions stayed in my mind for a long time until, at one point, I sat down to figure out the secret behind hollow elves and elven mounds that rise up on four glowing pillars of fire. Once I started reading folk tales, I was hooked. Luckily, I work in a library that keeps a nice section on folklore. When I started digging, I found more and more literature in our archives. I noticed that the majority of literature was quite old. Furthermore I found that folklore illustration was often put together from serveral artists and therefore inconsistent in style and expression. These things gave me an idea to make a bestiary and illustrate all the creatures myself.

greydog: Is there much interest in Danish folklore in Denmark itself?

jørgen: Not in general. There’s been a handful of new fantasy books that focus on folklore and we have seen a couple of small scale Nordic movies that deal with the subject (Huldra – Lady of the Forest and Troll Hunter)

greydog: The Troll Hunter film is superb, and most unusual in its take on the subject. One of greydog‘s fiction projects for 2016/17, The Children of Angles and Corners, is about the re-emergence of huldrefolk or huldufolk. Tell us something about the nature of troldfolk, as depicted in your art.

jørgen: When I made troldfolk.dk, I set out to make a bestiary, or field guide, to all of the folklore creatures of Denmark. What that means is describing the traits and abilities of each creature – their nature, if you will. That was a hard job, because the literary sources don’t classify each type of creature very consistently. Furthermore, to visualize my bestiary, I also had to bring each creature out into the open and draw them top to bottom on a blank background. Again the sources aren´t very helpful. Details are sparse and inconsistent. So again I had to try and capture their look and draw each creature my own way. The field guide therefore, presents over two dozen Scandinavian folklore creatures, that are each cleary documented and visualized. In that way it can be useful as a tool for fiction writers or for implementing these creatures in roleplaying games or computer games.

Choosing this perspective for troldfolk.dk also meant that you lose some of the original mystery concering trolls and fairies the way they were traditionally perceived. Don´t forget that these creatures were very real to farmers in the 19th century. Not just children but grown ups actually believed in brownies, ghosts and elves. Traditionally, there are some general traits about their nature. They were most often perceived as dangerous and something you should avoid dealing with. Elven maids look beautiful. They dance and sing in the fields at night, but if you join their dance, you may die. Other folklore creatures are benign or even helpful if you treat them right. Some of them are mortal and they grow old and die like normal people. Other creatures are more similar to ghosts and the undead.

greydog: You told us recently that you have been looking into British folklore as well. What areas interest you?

jørgen: I want to look more into the differences and similarities between the fairy world of the British Isles and Scandinavia. When I set out to study folklore, I thought the Danish creatures would be very unique to Denmark. That wasn´t the case. Folklore is subject to cultural exchange across borders. Just look at dragons. But especially I want to learn more about the British tradition of the fairy court. One of the things that fascinate me about British fairy lore is the strong ties between the fairy realm and human souls and the afterlife. I belive that idea is far more widespread in your area.

greydog: Your fabulous illustrations are how we spotted you. Which artists do you feel have influenced your style?

jørgen: I have a lot of influences of course. I´m very fascinated by the old Nordic illustrators of the 18th century. They really conceptualized the look of the Nordic trolls and their style is carried on today. Look at Theodor Kittelsen or John Baur. Modern inspiration inclues Brian Froud, Iain Mccaig, Tony Diterlizzi, Paul Bonner and Justin Sweet. Hmm, I could go on. Must make a list on my website.

greydog: And although we know a couple of those, including Brian Froud, we must look some of the others up. Could tell us a little about your painting techniques?

jørgen: The illustations for troldfolk.dk are all hand drawn and colored digitally. Recently I chose to work in traditional media again and I use ink, watercolor, guache and acrylics. I´m really not set on a specific style. I like to try out new materials and styles. Just take a look at bechart.dk

greydog: We know that you accept commissions. Do you have serious commercial ambitions for your artwork, such as a printed bestiary, or is it mostly for your own pleasure?

jørgen: For me art is first and foremost a pleasure but I’m also dead serious about it. I accept commissions that I feel are in tune with what I want to do. Originally I wanted to make a book, but I decided to make a website to reach a broader audience. My goal has always been to inspire people to learn about Nordic folklore and to that purpose a website is more useful. However, I´m still planning to supplement the website with a printed book at some point. This will include a lot more illustrations of each creature and hopefully show them in their proper surroundings.

greydog: Folklore is a major source for fantasy literature. Do you read fantasy or weird fiction yourself?

jørgen: Even though I´m a librarian, I don’t read a lot. I use most of my spare time drawing and when I do read, it´s mostly non-fiction, folklore sources or sometimes a piece of classic literature. I read slowly, so I have to be picky. I do enjoy fantasy a lot and I´ve read Tolkien, the Dragonlance saga, Beowulf, but also a lot of Poe and I´m fascinated by Lovecraft’s dark universe.

61dce34d3f-Bech_ringwraith_sepia — ringwraith, bech

greydog: Good man! One question out of curiosity – in recent years, Scandinavia has become renowned for what many call ‘Nordic noir‘, in books and films. Denmark is often thrown in with Norway, Sweden and Iceland, as if they were similar. Is this fair?

jørgen: I’m not bothered by it. There’s a Nordic kinship that I appreciate. I dont feel Danish identity is in any way threatened by this generalization.

greydog: And finally, any plans for your art in the New Year? More bestiary entries, or something new?

jørgen: I’m hired in to do some concept art for a game production and that will probably keep me busy for a while. Can´t tell you anything about it yet, though. Besides that my plan is to do a lot of art, prepare exhibitions and try and sell some 🙂

greydog: We wish you much luck with that and thank you, Jørgen Bech Pedersen. As mentioned, you can find the Bech Bestiary here:

troldfolk

For each illustration in the bestiary, there is also a text piece which is well worth reading. Don’t be put off if you don’t speak Danske – we merely copied the text and pasted it into the google on-line Danish to English translator. It’s not perfect, but there’s lots of great information there. And Bech’s art in general is on-line here:

bech art

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That’s probably the last of our ‘Weird Art’ theme for 2015, but it will return next year. Do keep tuning in – greydogtales continues over the festive season, thought perhaps in a slightly more random “surely I didn’t drink all that brandy” manner…

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John Coulthart: Axioms & Other Dark Beasts

December 18, 2015 greydogtales Leave a comment

We’re delighted to be joined today by an outstanding and award-winning illustrator of what we loosely term ‘the weird’, John Coulthart. We glide through artistic techniques and influences, discussing John’s cracking website, his own writing, Lovecraft and Ligotti along the way. And we have an exclusive view of the original cover design for his Axiom project. It doesn’t get much better (unless you were hoping for a photograph of Django running into a tree).

We would say something else nice and introductory about John, but really the interview and the art tell you what you need to know. So let’s just do this thing…

greydog: Welcome to greydogtales. For once we’re not sure where to start. Not only do you produce striking illustrations, but you also write, and you provide a website packed with fascinating articles, weird trivia and the work of other illustrators. Do you see yourself as an artist with sidelines, or a multi-media person?

coulthart: Art has always been the dominant thing, and it’s how I make a living, but I realised I enjoyed writing when I was about 9 or 10, and that I had some facility for it. The first thing I had published in any form was a poem in the local newspaper when I was 10. In secondary school I won the art prize but a year or so later I was thinking seriously about getting fiction published somewhere. I’d been writing and illustrating a lot of derivative fantasy stuff, and working on a novel that never got very far because I kept writing and rewriting the first few chapters. Shortly after that I was creating album artwork for Hawkwind but also writing another novel, a wildly uncommercial thing that was almost wholly dream sequences and “experimental” prose. I only stopped the writing when I started adapting the Lovecraft stories since that was a very labour-intensive process. I’d also realised by that point that I needed to think more seriously about why I wanted to write fiction when things were going well art-wise.

greydog: For some people, achieving a blog like feuilleton would be enough in its own right. It’s like greydogtales, but produced by someone who knows what they’re doing (greydog is an unrepentant grasshopper, and about as complex). Is the multi-layered nature of feuilleton a reflection of your own personality, or are we reading too much into it?

coulthart: Ha, I didn’t know what I was doing at all when I started. The thing appeared on a whim after someone asked me to helped them put a website together. I installed a database and WordPress so they could have a blog/news feature then realised a) that it was relatively easy to set up, and b) I could do the same for myself. It didn’t feel at all serious until 2007 when I wrote a lengthy piece one weekend about the album cover art of Barney Bubbles who I felt was under-represented on the web. That one post received a huge amount of attention, and led (indirectly) to a book of Barney’s work being published, and my name appearing in the New York Times. The discipline of making a daily post has helped hone my writing, at least where non-fiction is concerned. It’s also led to my being asked to write a few paid pieces for design magazines, something I never expected at all.

It’s very much a reflection of my personality since I don’t write about anything I’m not interested in. I like the flexibility of the form: you can write short or at great length or even only post links as I do each weekend; you can include visuals or videos or music mixes; and you control the platform more than you do in social media. I’ve found individual posts to be very useful for having a fixed statement or essay available in a public space. I’ve spent years telling people about David Rudkin’s TV play, Penda’s Fen, for example, but there’s no need to repeat yourself at length when you can send someone a link to something you’ve written.

tentaclelatitudes — tentacle latitudes, john coulthart

greydog: Penda’s Fen was our introduction to Manichean dualism (we don’t get to say that often) many years ago, and left a lasting impression. If you watch it as a teenager, it raises so much about your identity, your sexuality and your belief systems – and somehow indelibly writes Edward Elgar into the mix. Everyone should see it. And you’ve written at length about David Rudkin‘s work in the recent book Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies (link on sidebar).

Back to business. We’re asking all our feature artists something about the professional process, for those who don’t work in this field. You’ve undertaken a lot of commissions from publishers. How much creative freedom do you tend to get when executing a book cover?

coulthart: It depends very much on the publisher and art director commissioning the work, but most mid-range publishers, and all the big ones have specific ideas of the direction they want to see you following. Some novels make certain cover designs seem inevitable whereas others might suggest any number of different approaches; if the book is in the latter category then it helps to have someone dictating the direction before you begin. The worst kind of job for a designer or illustrator is one where the client doesn’t know what they want but insists on guiding the project, or—worse—changes their mind once you’ve started work.

greydog: Often the first thing that we notice when we see a Coulthart piece is the amazing intricacy of your style. With something like the interior illustrations for The Haunter of the Dark, for example, how long would a single page/plate take to be completed?

coulthart: All those Lovecraft pages took around two weeks to draw which is why I stopped using such fine pens when I started work on the Lord Horror comics. At the time I only had one Rotring drawing pen which had a 0.2 mm nib. Rotring pens are expensive precision things, and I didn’t have the money to buy a set so I got used to shading with extremely fine lines. By the time I started on the Lord Horror comics I had a few more pens so I switched to 0.5 which is still a fine line but it halved the production time.

greydog: A number of your pieces remind us of the detailed work of Victorian and Edwardian illustrators. Gustave Doré springs to mind immediately. Is this an area you mine for inspiration, or an accidental reflection of earlier approaches?

coulthart: Yes, the atmosphere of Doré’s work was something I was aiming at when I began The Haunter of the Dark. I wanted to get away from the poor science-fiction art I’d been creating for Hawkwind, and also try and present Lovecraft’s stories pictorially with the same seriousness they had on the page. I dislike the EC style of horror comics with some chuckling host popping up at the end to crack a joke. The initial impetus came from Berni Wrighton’s Frankenstein portfolio which borrows from Doré’s Ancient Mariner in two of the plates. (He was actually working more in the style of Franklin Booth but I didn’t know this at the time.) Wrightson has done a lot of EC-style art but the Frankenstein drawings were intended as illustrations not comic panels. I’ve often said that my Lovecraft strips are really illustrated stories presented in a sequential form rather than comic-strip adaptations. I’ve never really considered myself to be a comic artist, I’m an illustrator who happened to choose the comics medium for those stories because it gave you access to every part of the story. The page layout and drawing style is much closer to European comics even though the subject is predominantly American.

greydog: When it comes to artwork, from which single project of yours did you gain the most personal satisfaction, regardless of reception or remuneration?

coulthart: That would be Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, the collected (“graphic novel”) edition of the Lord Horror comics I worked on with David Britton during the 1990s. Reverbstorm was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a comic series that was excessive and transgressive knowing all the time that it would still be published. My ink drawing in Reverbstorm is the best I’ve done anywhere, while the comic itself throws Modernist literature (mostly Joyce and Eliot) and Cubist/Expressionist art into a soup of material from Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan comics and the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft and Hodgson. There’s never been anything in comics that offered these kinds of juxtapositions over so many pages.

greydog: Let’s escape art for a moment. We grew up on the albums Hall of the Mountain Grill, Warrior on the Edge of Time and Michael Moorcock‘s New Worlds Fair, and you’ve done cover art for Hawkwind. Were you also interested in that musical ‘zone’, or was it just another job?

coulthart: Yes, I liked Hawkwind a great deal circa 1980, and I still like the albums they made in the 1970s. I also liked a lot of other music at the time that was more of its time – groups such as Cabaret Voltaire – but Hawkwind were attractive for the loose mythology that surrounded their albums and the group. A lot of the mythology was simply the product of Barney Bubbles’ sleeve designs so the combination of those two things – design and mythology – led me to start drawing a series of Hawkwind-related pictures. In the summer of 1980 I was lucky to meet someone who knew the band so that in turn led to my being asked to work for the group shortly after. This was a great opportunity at the time but it was also frustrating as I was trying to produce designs as well as illustrations but without having access to any of the facilities – or contact with the printers – that you needed to create graphic design. The disaffection – and dissatisfaction with my own work – pushed me to quit the album cover work and do something completely different which was the HP Lovecraft comics.

greydog: And we are, at heart, a blog about weird fiction, a term thankfully hard to define. Which written works in this field stand out most for you as a reader?

coulthart: There’s too many to choose so I’ll concentrate on man-of-the-moment Thomas Ligotti. I dug out my old copy of Songs of a Dead Dreamer before the new Penguin edition came out, and I’ve recently read Teatro Grottesco and Grimscribe, neither of which I’d read before. A lot of contemporary genre writing bores me because it reads the same: too many authors whose unobtrusive prose styles would render them indistinguishable from each other if you removed the names from their stories in a collection. You can’t say this about Ligotti: his prose and his obsessions are as immediately recognisable as a few seconds of animation by the Brothers Quay. Grimscribe is good but Teatro Grottesco is even better, and is essential reading. It’s disgraceful that books of his are currently out of print but then this was the case with Robert Aickman for many years, and it’s still the case with other exceptional writers.

nyarlathotep-modofly — nyarlathotep, john coulthart

greydog: The author Ted E Grau, who we interviewed here last week, is also a huge Ligotti fan. Tell us about your own fiction. You’ve written a number of short pieces, both fiction and critical reviews, and you have a long term project, Axiom, on which you’ve been working for some time. Do you have a specific ambition as regards your writing?

coulthart: At the moment the ambition is to get my two novels published. Since 2001 I’ve been labouring on the Axiom project which has become quite a substantial thing although little of it has been made public. When you have a career in one medium it can seem like folly to be trying to pursue a separate career in another but as I said earlier, I’ve been writing fiction for years. The difference this time is that the new work is the first I’ve produced that I was at all satisfied with. The Axiom project emerged after I’d finished work on Reverbstorm: I’d spent several years collaborating with other people and wanted to return to creating something substantial of my own. Reverbstorm has an invented city as its location, and it was while working on that I realised that taking this in a different direction would give me something that reflected my own interest in real or imaginary cities, in architecture and so on.

So the first novel, Axiom, establishes a setting for a proposed series of works in different media. The frame is such that this could support a narrative with few (or no) generic features, or something that was full-on cosmic horror. A city always is a useful device if you want to tell a variety of stories, and there are many fictional precedents. Axiom (the novel) is four connected narratives that describe a year in the life of the city, the tone being dark fantasy grading to horror. I have an agent who’s tried the book with all the main UK genre imprints, including a number of places I wouldn’t have considered if I’d been sending it out myself. We did get an offer from one UK publisher, and things had reached the contract stage when they promptly went into receivership. I’ve been surprised by some of the reactions towards the sexual content: this, more than anything else, seems to have been a problem for the book being accepted. It sounds ridiculous in 2015 to say you’re being rejected on account of this but that’s what we’ve been told. One of the reactions made me wonder whether they’d read any Ballard or Barker or Burroughs. This situation has been a surprise mainly because I don’t regard what I’ve been writing as being particularly transgressive, it’s just that one of the things I’ve been exploring (which was also touched on in Reverbstorm) is what I call the Eros of the Monstrous, in other words giving your abominations a sexuality. It’s evident that some people aren’t keen on this but it’s a subject that interests me, and I’ve been working on new art and writing that explores this further.

Another stumbling block seems to have been working in an area which (to me) is midway between the genre world and the literary world. I like these hybrid zones wherever they occur but the business of publishing isn’t always encouraging of things that don’t easily fit their boxes. We took a similar approach with Reverbstorm which I’ve called a psychopathology of heroic fantasy: the trappings of adventure comics were present throughout, especially references to Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan, but the narrative veers continually away from this into Modernist styles and techniques. This is the perfect way to limit your audience: you alienate the people who want the swashbuckling adventure stuff, and you get little interest from the art crowd who are put off by the vulgarity elsewhere.

The second novel in the Axiom project, Vitriol, is a 217,000-word doorstop featuring invented psychedelic drugs, sword fights, occult rituals, para-dimensional monstrosities, an alchemist war, and a great deal of gay sex. We had a very nice rejection for this one from a major UK publisher who said they loved the book but didn’t think it was commercial enough. I’m hoping this isn’t the consensus as I spent seven years writing Vitriol, creating the kind of book I’d want to read myself but which I couldn’t find on the shelves; on that level it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve done, and it’s also a better novel than the first one. Many people have assumed I’d opt for self-publishing these novels which is still an option – I design books, after all – but publishers have the advantage of marketing and distribution. In the meantime, I’ve been working on material for a new Axiom book that will combine short pieces of fiction with graphics, and also thinking about a new novel.

Cover 5 — original axiom design, john coulthart

greydog: We can only wish you good fortune on the whole Axiom venture. As we grew up reading Burroughs and books like Samuel Delany‘s Dhalgren (pretty wild for teens from a small Yorkshire town) it seems retrogressive that sexual content in this sort of fiction should be a block.

Now, we love discovering new illustrators of the weird. Can you suggest someone else working today who stands out to you, someone with whom we might not be familiar?

coulthart: I think you may already know Santiago Caruso’s exceptional art (http://www.santiagocaruso.com.ar/). His finely-detailed Lovecraftian pieces were one of the highlights of the NecronomiCon art show in Providence in August. Elsewhere I’ve been impressed by Caitlin Hackett’s surreal fairytale drawings (https://caitlinhackett.carbonmade.com/projects/3016488), Jason Grim’s disturbing self-portraits (http://www.jasongrimart.com/#!photography/c24t1), Alison Scarpulla’s mysterious photographs (https://www.flickr.com/photos/aliscarpulla/page2), and Cristina Francov’s strange paintings (http://www.cristinafrancov.com/en-galeria-obras-selectas.html).

gods1yigg — gods of yigg, john coulthart

greydog: Glad you mention Santiago Caruso. His work is particularly stunning, and we’re currently obsessing on the range of fine South American illustrators (see earlier Sebastian Cabrol post). We hope to have more of them on greydogtales in due course. So what other Coulthart project(s) can we look forward to seeing in 2016?

coulthart: On the shelves at the moment there’s The Gods of H P Lovecraft, a collection of new stories from JournalStone Publishing, edited by Aaron French. I illustrated six of the stories, each of which concerns a different Lovecraftian creature or entity. Also out in January (I guess, because I haven’t been given a release date) is a book design for a large US outlet that I’m not saying much about at the moment since I want it to be a surprise. But it’s going to be a lavish production so I’m looking forward to seeing it. And I’ve just received a commission for another project that will have to remain mysterious but this will be an alternate history by a well-regarded author scheduled for release in late 2016. Further off, I’ve agreed to illustrate William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland for Swan River Press. There’s no schedule established for that one but I’m planning on starting work in the New Year.

greydog: Thank you so much, John Coulthart. We highly recommend John’s website, feuilleton, which is a miscellany of thoughts and wonders, and can be found through this link:

feuilleton

(Of course, we also highly recommend that you check out some of the previous posts mentioned on greydogtales as well, but our site is better described as a bucket of things we tripped over when trying to avoid the dogs. Interviews with Ted E Grau and Sebastian Cabrol can be found by checking on the left.)

Apart from The Gods of H P Lovecraft, you may also want to have a look at John’s Haunter of the Dark book while you’re browsing. The UK link is on the right-hand sidebar:

haunter Haunter of the Dark US

In but a few days we bring you one of our finds of this autumn – a heavily illustrated feature on the terrific Danish folklore/folk-horror artist Jorgen Bech Pedersen. We’ll try to fit some more longdogs in before the end of December. And we might have a few days off, you never know…

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Ted E Grau: A Voice from the Nameless Dark

December 11, 2015 greydogtales Leave a comment

Today’s feature is a real treat – an interview with contemporary horror writer Ted E Grau. Ted was actually meant to be the classic British author H Russell Wakefield (1888 – 1964), which has probably surprised both of them. However, the talented Mr Grau responded so promptly to our outline that we decided to hold the party right here, right now. Remember listeners, carpe diem (that’s Latin for “my fish has just expired”).

For any newcomers, T.E. Grau is an author of dark fiction whose work has been featured in dozens of anthologies, magazines, literary journals, and audio platforms. The Nameless Dark, his first collection of short fiction, was released in July of 2015 by Lethe Press. The novelette They Don’t Come Home Anymore will be published in 2016 through This Is Horror. Grau lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

greydogtales is not a review site. That style doesn’t sit well on our ancient shoulders. We merely highlight weird writing and art that takes our fancy, and wonder at the madness of longdogs and lurchers. It is fair to say, though, that The Nameless Dark is a damned fine collection, and would be very high on our recommended list if we actually had one.

Let’s stop writing and start listening…

greydog: Hello and welcome to greydogtales, Ted.

tg: Greetings to you and your grey dogs, John, and thank you for having me. I quite enjoyed the hike up the windswept hills. Beautiful country up here round Yorkshire.

greydog: You’re even more welcome, saying nice things like that. So, we first noticed your work in 2013, and then in the 2014 anthology World War Cthulhu, with your story White Feather. Oddly enough, that anthology also included Willie Meikle and the illustrator M Wayne Miller, both of whom were interviewed here earlier this autumn. Now you have your own collection out. Have you been building up to this for a while?

tg: I have, probably longer than most. The Nameless Dark – A Collection, covers all of my short story writing starting from when I first switched from screenwriting to prose in early 2010, including my first completed piece, “Transmission,” up to my most recent (“Expat”) at the time I signed the contract with Lethe Press. Even though the earlier pieces are, well, “early” in my growth as a fiction writer, and almost exclusively deal with Mythos/Lovecraftian elements (as writing Lovecraftian fiction for anthologies was my entré into prose), I felt like it was important to include my earliest stuff all the way to the present in this first collection, if only for myself and my family and personal posterity. Basically, this collection shows my beginnings in 2010 up to 2015, covering a five year span of writing, reading, and thinking about what I wanted to say and do as a writer of dark fiction.

greydog: A number of your protagonists do not exactly make it out in one piece, either mentally or physically. Do you see yourself as a bleak writer, or is this just realism within the context of story-telling?

tg: I suppose I see myself as a writer of bleak tales, as I’m drawn to and fascinated by bleak subject matter. Abandoned places, natural decay, weathering, geologic grind, socio/psychopaths, dead enders, tragedy, a cold, uncaring universe. I do have a shade of the pessimist in my soul, locked arm in arm with a detached curiosity for the ghoulish, and a love of the dark and arcane. That Germania gene. Somehow I balance this with a pretty cheery attitude on the day-to-day. I blame my wife and daughter for that.

Happy endings in stories work, and have a time and place (take any movie about sports, for example), but I think ending on a downer or with some horrific realization, either large or small, is more interesting, and more indicative of reality.

greydog: Outside of the more obvious weird and horror writers, have you been influenced by authors in other genres, classical or contemporary?

tg: Hunter S. Thompson is one, for sure. I was referred to him by someone who noted that our styles were similar back when I was writing a snotty humor/satire column in a local arts paper in Omaha, Nebraska while in college. When I read Thompson, I realized how much of a novice I was, but also that I wasn’t alone in the vast stylistic universe. I read a lot of Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac, Kesey, Farina, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the Beats around that time, as well, and I can still feel that particular rhythm in a lot of my writing. I have to pull it back sometimes, or chop it up, as when I really get going, some of my phrasing sounds like bad Beatnik pastiche. A lot of my rewriting is getting out of my own way, either based on my influences or just my natural verbal inclinations.

I cut my reading teeth in high fantasy and sword and sorcery in late 70’s and early 80’s, so I’m sure there’s a lot of that swirling around in the broth, as well. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard (and several Conan rip-off novels), David Eddings, Lloyd Alexander, R.A. Salvatore, Hickman & Weis, etc. Dungeons & Dragons has probably exerted the largest influence on my imagination over anything else.

In a contemporary sense, I’ve seen a bit of an influence from Laird Barron in some of my writing, and maybe some Richard Gavin, as I very much resonate with their work and masterful atmospherics and creation of authentic dread out of the seemingly mundane. I don’t find much horror fiction scary, but they are two writers (as well as Thomas Ligotti, T.E.D. Klein, Adam Nevill, Michael Marshall Smith, and a few other) who can genuinely give me the creeps. I’m so thankful for that.

Lawrence Block has influenced me in terms of the cleanness and leanness of his prose, saying what needs to be said without a whole song and dance. I heavily read Cormac McCarthy after most of my stories in the collection were finished, but I’m sure he’ll seep into my newer tales, as no one does brutality like he does. He’s a one-punch KO boxer. The Tyson of American letters.

Flannery O’Connor isn’t so much an influence as an example of an unattainable goal, in terms of her style and tone – a little humorous, a whole lot dark, possessing a keen insight into people that I don’t currently possess, and probably never will, no matter how much I listen and observe. She’s a monster in the best sense of the word. The finest writer I’ve ever read.

greydog: Thompson and Burroughs were particular favourites of ours when we had more time to read. And, please take this as a compliment, we do see fragments of Thomas Ligotti in the collection, albeit with less dense prose and a lighter touch. Are you a fan of his work?

tg: I absolutely am. For my money, he’s our greatest living (semi-working) horror writer (T.E.D. Klein would be just below, if he still wrote). Very few write like he does, or see the world in a similar way. He’s sacrificed so much for this rare world-view, and we readers are the fortunate heirs. He’s what horror fiction should be.

As for density of prose (one of my ongoing battles with myself), I would be willing to weigh out my stuff against Ligotti’s on a specially calibrated Adjective and Adverb Scale. I think the shade of my purple would stack up pretty well against his. But as I continue this journey, I hope to see him claim eventual victory. He writes lavender better than I do anyway…

greydog: Maybe we need to dust off our scales again. Going back to The Nameless Dark for a moment, some writers build on recurring locales or characters in their work. Your collection is notable for the incredibly wide range of settings and individuals we encounter. Do you have any plans for writing more ‘serial’ fiction, in the sense of connected tales?

tg: Oh yes. I have big plans for Salt Creek, Nebraska, which made its first public appearance in “The Mission.” A collection in the coming years of all prairie and rural horror tales will feature several Salt Creek tales, as will at least one novel and possibly two that I have rolling around in my head.

Another story, “MonoChrome,” which was published late last year in the sadly overlooked but exceedingly excellent King in Yellow tribute anthology In The Court of the Yellow King, edited by Glynn Owen Barrass, is set in Los Angeles, and features a hard luck ex-homicide cop/ex-reporter/current below-the-line “fixer” and professional inebriate named Henry Ganz. I want to write more about this guy and his Los Angeles.

greydog: We look forward to Salt Creek especially, being suckers for the rural nightmare. Now, we might as well mention the eldritch, non-Euclidean elephant in the room at this point. There seems to be a Lovecraftian resurrection at the moment, not that your work is limited to that area. Is this sustainable, or do you feel that the base concepts will become mined out?

tg: I think the market will become saturated, or actually already has, so one would assume that most of the targeted readership will get bored with reading the same stuff reheated over and over again. But, it doesn’t seem to be abating at all, so what do I know?

The Lovecraftian omniverse is a fun zip code in which to live, so I get why it has remained popular all these years. Stories with a cosmic horror element that Lovecraft helped build up and codify for easier digestion will always have an appeal for curious stargazers and devoted heretics like me. A reality without benevolent gods, lacking a bearded grandfather looking out for your best interests, is a very interesting (appealing?) one to contemplate. For me, it was so different in POV than the Judeo Christian certitude in which I was raised that it knocked me back a couple of steps when I first stumbled across it. As a writer, I’m stepping out of Lovecraft Country for a while, but I know I’ll be back, as in many ways it’ll always be home, even with all its dysfunction and shame.

greydog: Strangely enough, one of our favourite stories in the collection is the un-Lovecraftian Beer & Worms, an incredibly simple insight into human thinking (or inhuman thinking). Is this an isolated incident, or do you like enjoy twisting everyday life like that?

tg: I do love taking the normal and safe and twisting it into something terrible. Hitchcock was a master at doing this, and devoted to “ruining” the safety of normalcy by injecting horror into the commonplace. If I was better with plotting, you’d see more of these stories from me. Even so, I’ll be doing more of this in the coming years, especially in some of the crime/Noir fiction I’m slowly constructing. It’s fun to jump back and forth from the supernatural to the natural.

greydog: We hear that you have a new deal with This Is Horror. Are you allowed to say anything about what might be coming out from that source?

tg: I signed a publishing deal with This Is Horror a few months back, and I’m thrilled to be working with such a quality outfit that has published some of my favorite writers. The contract specifies one new work (in the novella range, but certainly allows for something longer), with an understanding that makes it a bit open-ended, meaning I could publish two or more works with them in 2016. The trust they’ve shown in my writing is humbling, and I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to release my work with This Is Horror in the coming year.

The two pieces I’m batting around right now are They Don’t Come Home Anymore, which is my take on obsession, hero worship, legend vs. fact, and vampire culture; and a still-untitled piece set in a particularly American Doomsday Seed Vault constructed on domestic soil (patriotic Yanks certainly can’t trust those cunning, soft-bellied Euros with the future of all plant life on earth!). A third work is much more undefined and definitely Big W Weird that will be my thinly veiled tribute to Thomas Ligotti.

greydog: Clearly you are anathema to our own dark fiction ambitions. That’s why we like featuring illustrators and audio clips – we don’t do much of that sort of thing. So we’ll give you a last chance to say something nice about longdogs, lurchers and sighthounds. It might just get you off the hook.

tg: As a guy who grew up with labradors and weimaraners and pheasant-brush spaniels and all sort of farm dog mutts, who’s only seen a whippet on Los Angeles sidewalks and greyhounds in commercials, I’m afraid anything I say about longdogs will only disappoint you, so I’ll just leave this parcel of soup bones on the table and see myself out. The hills are calling for the journey back down to the sea.

greydog: Bones are always good, as long as they’re someone else’s. Many thanks, Ted E Grau.

tg: Huge thanks to you, John. It’s been fun.

Apart from his fiction, it’s always well worth dropping in on Ted’s website/blog, cosmicomicon, which can be found here:

cosmicomicon

And The Nameless Dark can be picked up now. We don’t think you’ll be disappointed (UK link on sidebar)

the nameless dark, lethe press

the nameless dark, amazon us

Coming up on greydogtales: More longdog photos, good news again from the Spiritualist Telegraph, the art of Danish folk-lore and many other related weirdnesses…

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Raphael Ordonez: Fractals & Fantasies

December 8, 2015 greydogtales 2 Comments

On the principle that greydogtales is another country, we’re being different again. Today’s feature is an unusual illustrated interview with mathematician, artist and writer Raphael Ordonez. We initially asked the erudite Raphael to join us as part of our weird art theme, but there’s much more to it than that – we slide in and out of fractals, fantastic illustrators, biology and his own fantasy fiction along the way.

As greydogtales is also a grasshopper in that other country, we first came across Raphael accidentally through his blog, Alone with Alone (link at end of interview), and then discovered his interest in William Hope Hodgson. We had to delve further. So here are some thoughts from the chap himself, and some terrific pieces of art.

greydog: Welcome, Raphael. As you know, we’re majoring on weird art and illustration here at the moment. You’ve done paintings from real life and some quite fantastical pieces.

ro: You could say that fantasy illustration is how I got into art. In school I often got in trouble in math class for drawing pictures of monsters and goddesses and maps of imaginary countries instead of listening to the teacher. When I went to college as an art student, it was with the intention of becoming a fantasy illustrator. I can only do that kind of art when the mood hits me, though. That’s probably why I abandoned that idea of a career. Or maybe I’m just capricious.

When I paint from nature, I’m generally going for a purely visual, abstract beauty. The urge to paint something round and red strikes, for instance, and I go find a mountain laurel bean. This kind of motivation has grown up slowly in me over the years. Paul Klee, whose art was very abstract, describes a painter as a tree, drawing material up out of the earth and turning it into a crown of leaves, transforming it in the process. My art is very different from his, but I think he really captured what it’s all about.

In Forms and Substances in the Arts, Etienne Gilson describes the perennial opposition between “drawing” and “painting,” that is, between art as illustration and art as visual beauty. I feel this tension in myself, and continually vacillate between one and the other.

greydog: The first thing we noticed was the strength and clarity of light in your paintings. Is this about personal style, or is it also something to do with the quality of the light where you live?

ro: I like sharp chiaroscuro in most everything in life, including art. Perhaps that’s why I love the Santa Fe area so much. My paintings tend to reflect the high deserts and plains of the American Southwest rather than where I live, that is, the South Texas brush country. Though I’ve been here most of my life, I find the general quality of light uncongenial. Lately I’ve been doing paintings of local legendry from the time of the Spanish explorers, so perhaps the still, sultry air and bright, hazy skies of my environment are starting to sink in at last!

greydog: We assume that you have a naturalist’s heart and eye, given your detailed paintings of insects and plants.

ro: I’m not a trained biologist, but I’ve always spent a lot of time outdoors, camping and backpacking and studying plants and animals, especially insects. I enjoy collecting live specimens and taking pictures with my digital microscope. I also go birdwatching and beachcombing and that sort of thing. Mostly I like to get out where it’s very quiet and watch things grow.

My dad was a science teacher when I was a kid, and one of my favorite toys was an old microscope with which we’d project images of live pond samples on my playroom wall. We also went on collecting expeditions to the gulf coast. My room was a combination museum and menagerie, with pinned insects, seashells, skeletons, fossils, and live animals. I was most interested in insects, and once got a detailed tour of a university entomology department from a doctoral student my dad knew.

Not much has changed in the transition to adulthood. A while back I grew a magnificent colony of Madagascar hissing cockroaches from a single pair. The excess roaches were in turn fed to a pinktoe tarantula, but, unlike Renfield, I stopped the food chain there. My wife made me get rid of them when our first baby came, but now she misses them!

My art definitely reflects these interests. I often paint insects because they fascinate me, but also because they embody so many different shapes and colors, and seem pieced together from distinct components, like clockwork. I gravitate toward cacti and flowers for the same reason. I focus on the small-scale because I like precision, and you can’t be precise with a field of grass or a distant oak. I’ve always had trouble seeing the forest for the trees, and my paintings tend not to have much middle ground.

greydog: And yet that’s perhaps what makes them so striking. You work in both oil and watercolour on a variety of surfaces. Which do you find most satisfying?

ro: I usually work in watercolor when I want to illustrate something, and oil when the focus is color and form. For watercolor I use a heavy hot-pressed paper, as this allows for a great amount of detail. Sometimes I also paint on Claybord, which consists of an absorbent clay ground on a sheet of hardboard. It’s a resilient, versatile surface, and I’ve used it for both watercolors and oils.

Over the years I’ve learned to pay careful attention to my materials, and I enjoy learning about traditional preparation methods and the chemical compositions of my pigments.

greydog: We’d also like to mention your fractal art, which is very striking. Could you give us a simple introduction to that work?

ro: Loosely speaking, a fractal is a figure that falls between dimensions. A smooth curve like a circle or a line is one-dimensional; a smooth surface like a plane or a sphere is two-dimensional. But you could imagine a curve that’s so squiggly it transcends the first dimension but doesn’t quite make it to the second, or so disjointed that it falls short of the first dimension. That’s a fractal.

A lot of fractals (all the ones that appear in my digital art) are produced via an iterative process. For instance, you might begin with a line segment, remove the middle third, and replace it with two of the same length, meeting so as to form an equilateral triangle. You then do that to each of the four segments that result, and so on, ad infinitum. That’s how the Koch snowflake is formed.

I first learned about fractals from a film shown in my college design class. I was so impressed by their beauty that I went out and switched my major to mathematics. Now I’m a university math professor who specializes in geometry (though not fractal geometry). When I make fractal art, I’m doing something that’s quite distinct in my mind from what I do when I paint. It reflects an intellectual rather than an artistic motivation.

greydog: Have you commercial ambitions, such as selling canvasses and prints, or book illustration?

ro: Lately I’ve sold a number of paintings through local galleries, and hope to sell more. It’s painful because I don’t like parting with my work! Up until recently I’d been storing all my finished paintings in boxes and not showing them to anybody. When I sell them I feel that I’m really giving them away and accepting a small honorarium in return for my time. That may seem pretentious, but, whatever anyone else may think of my work, to me it’s priceless and irreplaceable.

In Andrei Rublev, one of my favorite films, director Andrei Tarkovsky portrays different approaches to art and the ways in which art and practical realities come into conflict. The protagonist, surrounded by violence and spiritual compromise, descends into his own personal hell, but emerges with the conviction that art should be “a feast for the people.” And that’s come to be my own mission in life: to provide a feast for the people, to the fullest extent that my personal talents and limitations allow, through my teaching, my painting, my writing, my involvement in the local community.

I am interested in book illustration, though I haven’t illustrated anything but my own work thus far. I would enjoy illustrating the work of some of the older fantasists. Time is a limited resource, though, and it’s always a question of where to invest it. We’ll just have to see what develops!

greydog: We’re always looking for new artists and illustrators to investigate on greydogtales. Who do you particularly admire?

ro: When it comes to my illustrational side, I most admire William Blake and the early work of Samuel Palmer. Odilon Redon is another one of my favorites. His weird charcoal and pastel drawings make me think of Clark Ashton Smith. I’m also very fond of Pieter Breughel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch. Both strike me as being very much in keeping with the weird horror of William Hope Hodgson, and one Hodgson cover (the Ballantine Night Land) appears to be inspired by Bosch’s depiction of hell in The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Other sources of inspiration include late medieval illumination, the engravings of Albrecht Durer, the work of earth twentieth century illustrators like Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen, and the art of Frank Frazetta. I’m also fond of the cover art from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, to which the cover painting of my novel Dragonfly is an homage, and the poster art of the film noir era.

When it comes to my more abstract pursuits, I most enjoy Paul Klee, Georgia O’Keefe, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Rousseau.

greydog: You also write fantastical fiction. Mostly short stories, but you do have a novel out. What sort of themes do you explore in your writing?

ro: All of my published stories are set in the counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes (an explanation of which would involve an excursion into topology) and feature Paleozoic life forms, antediluvian races, and supernatural entities based on Greek and Semitic mythology. The human civilization in which the stories take place might be described as Steam Age (but not steampunk!) with Louis Sullivan skyscrapers and Art Nouveau flourishes, and occasional Bronze Age incursions.

My most recently published story, “The Scale-Tree” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) is mainly about art, and especially the Paul Klee quote referred to above. But in general my stories have to do with man and nature, particularly with the seeming impossibility of preserving a sense of hope or life-purpose in the face of a universe characterized by corruption and entropy and decay and dissolution.

I’m most inspired by older, “pre-genre” fantasy novelists, from Lord Dunsany and David Lindsay down to J. R. R. Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. I also like pulp-writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. On the science fiction side, A. E. van Vogt, Philip K. Dick, and Gene Wolfe are my favorite authors. My longer works tend to be action-oriented, with a certain hard-boiled vibe, and Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett are frequent sources of inspiration. My short stories owe something to Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver.

greydog: And while we’re talking about fiction, you yourself have an interest in William Hope Hodgson, to whom we raised a glass throughout October.

ro: Yes, Hodgson is definitely another major influence, especially through The Night Land and The House on the Borderland. He was clearly motivated by some of the themes I just mentioned. He might be said to have found his own answer to the horrors of a malignant universe winding slowly toward heat death, in the form of a time-transcending erotic love. That’s not an answer that can satisfy me. But perhaps it’s enough for me that he understood the question, which is, I feel, the question of my own life.

greydog: And finally, what’s next for Raphael Ordonez – more fiction, more painting, or both? Do you have a major project on the go?

ro: I have a short story (“Salt and Sorcery”) and a novel (The King of Nightspore’s Crown) in the works, both of which will hopefully be published in the not-so-distant future. The latter will feature another wrap-around cover by yours truly. That’s my next big artistic project.

greydog: Many thanks for your time, Raphael Ordonez.

Fletcher Vredenburgh, reviewing Raphael’s first novel Dragonfly on Black Gate, said:

Dragonfly is the first of a planned tetralogy. In this day of calculated, mass-marketed, trend-following books, here is a self-published adventure, practically handcrafted, with cover, map, and interior art all done by Ordoñez himself. It tells of a young prince let loose in a world of steam engines, complacent aristocrats, and tunnel-dwelling workers, and a social order on the verge of being overthrown. Ordoñez’ style hearkens back to the likes of A. E. van Vogt and Jack Vance, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Dragonfly is available here (check image in sidebar for UK source):

Dragonfly Amazon.com

And do visit Raphael’s website Alone with Alone for more examples of fractals, other art and thoughts on many topics of interest.

Alone alone with alone

Next time on greydogtales: Hm, depends on whether or not I ever finish this cursed Cthulhoid story I’m writing. So either a fascinating new article, or a picture of a longdog chewing a teddybear…

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Literature, lurchers and life