{"id":18700,"date":"2022-08-29T15:27:41","date_gmt":"2022-08-29T20:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/?p=18700"},"modified":"2022-08-29T15:27:41","modified_gmt":"2022-08-29T20:27:41","slug":"10-questions-with-s-elizabeth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/?p=18700","title":{"rendered":"10 Questions with S. Elizabeth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today we’re talking with S. Elizabeth, writer and curator extraordinaire of “The Art of the Occult” and “The Art of Darkness.”<\/em><\/p>\n

1. I became familiar with you when your previous book \u201cThe Art of the Occult\u201d released, and now you\u2019re back with \u201cThe Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre.\u201d Was it hard to convince your publisher that there was an audience for books discussing art? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it took much convincing at at all, and as it happens, my editor is the one who pitched both ideas to me! She reached out to me originally in 2019 for The Art of the Occult<\/em>, a book which she had the idea for, she just needed someone to write it! I am not sure how she happened upon me and I have never asked (I\u2019m weirdly shy to ask such a thing!) but I imagine it\u2019s because I have been writing about art and artists for well over a decade now, and many of these artists have esoteric or occult leanings. I have been privileged to work with the same editor at the same publisher over the past 3 years, and I think for the most part she really \u201cgets\u201d me. She\u2019s the impetus for The Art of Darkness <\/em>as well\u2013she presented the idea to me! And this publisher, The Quarto Group, as far as I can tell, is very big on art and artists, that\u2019s very much their thing, to publish inspiring niche-interest books are visually appealing, information rich, and stimulating.<\/p>\n

2. What is your process for selecting art for these books? Do you need to seek permission to use works of art in your books?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been collecting art online for as long as I\u2019ve been online\u2026I\u2019ve been keeping a sort of mental rolodex for the past 20 years! So for both books, I already had so many works in mind for each of the projects. What I did is I started with a wish list of hundreds of artists that I would like to include in the book, which I would then share with my editor, who would give me feedback. Feedback usually looked like \u201ctoo illustrative or too comic book-y or cartoon-y \u201cor what have you (those pieces absolutely have a place in the art world and in my heart, but they may have not been quite the right fit for the books, I get it, even if I might have been a little disappointed!) So I would whittle down my list and build it back up based on loads of research and my editor\u2019s suggestions, and then when I had a good-sized list to look at, I would look it over with an eye toward building groupings of images based on themes. I didn\u2019t want the chapters ordered chronologically, or in terms of art movements, I wanted something that felt much more interesting and imaginative. So after some thought, I structured The Art of Darkness into three parts, each broken down further into four chapters. So you\u2019d have something like Part I: It\u2019s All In Your Head, in which we would then have chapters about dreams and nightmares, psychological distress and whispers from the void. Further parts include The Human Condition, The World Around Us, and Visions from Beyond. I am really quite pleased with how it all pulled together! <\/p>\n

AND YES ABSOLUTELY. Permission to use the artwork is a MUST and it is a PROCESS. Gathering the permissions nearly takes as long as writing the book. Some images are in the public domain, and some can be acquired from museums and galleries, but there is a lot of reaching out to individual artists that has to occur, as well. And I did a lot of that work myself\u2026and it\u2019s not exactly a straightforward process. Between tracking down contact information for the artist (if they are still alive, that is\u2013otherwise, you might be dealing with galleries, estates, etc.) and actually finding them and receiving those permissions, you then have the concern of whether or not the artist can provide a high-enough resolution of the work, whether it fits with the layout of the book, and to backtrack a bit\u2013whether or not the publisher even agrees that the images you\u2019ve suggested will be appropriate for the overall project. In the course of this process of research and reaching out, which was never tedious, believe it or not\u2013I love to track down elusive art and artists!\u2013 I got a lot of email bounce backs, and oftentimes even if the email appeared to go through, there were a handful of artists I never heard back from. Sometimes I did get a response and received a \u201cno\u201d right off the bat. Sometimes, too, this occurred after some back and forth between myself and the artist, and we arrived at the determination that maybe my book wasn\u2019t a good fit for their artistic vision. And that\u2019s OK! It really is. It\u2019s not all going to work out, and you can\u2019t always get everything you want, and after getting over a bit of initial frustration, I frequently came to the conclusion that it was probably for the best.<\/p>\n

With regard to those artists who are no longer with us, sometimes I couldn\u2019t track down an estate contact, and when I did I never heard back from them. If it was the publisher reaching out, sometimes they either couldn\u2019t come to an agreement or they were perhaps unable to acquire a high enough resolution image that would work for this particular print medium.<\/p>\n

I know that was a lot of not -terribly-interesting info and not everyone cares how the sausage is made, but that all brings me to a point that I cannot stress enough. There are always going to be readers or critics who say \u201coh, I can\u2019t believe she forgot to include X\/Y\/Z artist!\u201d All of that boring explanation I gave just now? Any one of those reasons could be why I was unable to include such-and-such or so-and-so. It\u2019s so galling that people automatically presume that I (or anyone in this position) \u201cforgot.\u201d Okay, so I don\u2019t want to end that thought on a negative note, but that\u2019s just something that always burns my muffins. Ugh.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ 3. After \u201cThe Art of the Occult\u201d, what made you decide that darkness would be a good theme to explore, and were your publishers like, \u201cWhat?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n