The Master Of Monsters….an interview

This is an interview I did with Basil a while back….and it is Halloween after all!!!!

Basil Gogos is a world renowned artist and illustrator.  He is best known for his illustrations of the movie monsters of early cinema.  Painting in a way that incorporates lush or sometimes considered outlandish colors coupled with a classic realism has set his work apart and created a style and signature all his own.  We had the opportunity to have an incredibly enlightening conversation with this master of his craft.

H-RAMA. I was always into the Universal Monsters and discovered your artwork and your book and was absolutely blown away by the portraits. They’re incredible.  Did you have an interest in the Universal Monsters or were you hired as an illustrator at first.

Basil Gogos. I was interested , I saw all of them like everyone else when I was twelve years old, but I went on to become an illustrator and it turned out to be just another illustration I had to do which led me into the monsters that I know.  There was no preconceived idea, as an illustrator you just do what comes up and this was something that came up, which was issue no.9 with Vincent Price as Roderick Usher.  So it was just another job really that had to be done in a very strange way or not a way that I was familiar with.  It had to be something more or less not psychological, but something weird looking let’s put it that way, which I was not familiar with because I was a realist.  But as it turned out, not knowing whether I could do it, I took a chance and I did it and it worked out very well.  I didn’t want to take it to the publisher because I did not know if he was going to like it at all.  It had to be sort of psychedelic, that’s the word I was looking for, it was something different with loose colors and something that had to be done differently and it was and I didn’t know how to take it into the publisher, my agent at the time didn’t want to take it in either, it was strange to both of us what I did, but as it turned out the publisher loved it.

H-RAMA. And that’s where it all started?

BG. It started a romance for 25 years, so it was just another job.  You know you just, in those days you would take anything that came along so when you saw the golden rings you jump.  It was just another job that turned out very well.

H-RAMA. So working, illustrating these icons of cinema, did it build relationships with them?  Did they take to the paintings you were doing?  Did you get a good response from Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi?

BG. Oh yes, yes.  A lot of them were given the magazine to hold as a publicity stunt and they portrayed a magazine reader.  You would be able to see Karloff and then Karloff on the cover and it was more of a advertisement than anything else. They may have never read it, I don’t know, but I loved the old characters, in and out of character.

H-RAMA. I guess that’s the difference with say, the monsters of today and the monsters of that era, where these were actors in their own right and they developed these characters. Where today they don’t have that same weight to it. They don’t have that charisma anymore.

BG. Well, you’re very right. What they did have was they were actors to begin with.  A lot of them were stage actors like Lugosi and Karloff.  It was 1931 a year and half after talkies came into play.  So the movie industry, which was just a baby then, looked for stage actors who could project.  That’s why when you see the movies from 1931 you could see the stage attitude.

H-RAMA. You’re right, the way that they held themselves and the way they projected themselves was so stage like, it wasn’t movie like, and I guess that movies being pretty new at that time that maybe that had something to do with it….the character was so much deeper then it seems.

BG. They were still on the stage and they were projected very well and they were believable an there was a romance into all of this which is lacking today.  Today it is shocking. Special effects and gore and mutilations which don’t really make a good movie.  In those days it was rather romantic, which some of us saw it at the right age even before television came into play we could see something that we could relate to.  We didn’t go back home in shock.  It was frightening but enjoyable. So there was a romance into it, and these people were true actors.

H-RAMA. Oh yes.  Definitely.  You’ve actually done illustrations for Rob Zombie.  I know that he is a huge fan of yours.  Do you get any mutual admiration for…I know that there is a generations gap, but his interests lie in those same characters.  He just remade Halloween and there is a lot of gore in it, but there is a back story to it that makes you feel something for the characters where that is very missing in the genre in this point…..do you have any interest in what he has done?

BG. I wasn’t familiar with his work. I didn’t know the gentleman.  I spoke with him since then maybe 25 times on the phone but I never met him, to the point that he sent me a photograph of himself.  Because if you remember I did Hellbilly, and he sent me a black and white photograph because I prefer to work from black and white.  I said what color are your eyes, he said you can’t see them, they’re yellow, they’re contact lenses.  I didn’t know anything about him and he explained.  I said what color is your hair, he said grey, salt and pepper and we got to know each other through the eyes of the mind, so he impressed me very much although I did not know the man.

H-RAMA. So throughout these conversations is how you got to know each other and you were going to illustrate.

BG. He also told me that he would be going into film. It was a long time ago, that he would be getting into film which he did his third movie now.  He explained how, and maybe it was what I heard from other people because I didn’t see an of his movies, that he had so much gore in the first one.  Yes, he did tell me himself because it happened that Universal didn’t want to touch it.  A long period of time, he was trying to get a release and distribution of the the movie.  Universal wouldn’t…there was too much gore in it.  Too much blood.  He said, “I made it in a way that I should have expected it”.   But he did manage to sell the movie to someone else and from what I understand he’s proving to be quite a director and producer and I am very proud of him, but again , I haven’t seen his movies.  He is an artist you know.  He was able to apply art to it.  So an artist has a little bit of an edge over say an average director.  Whatever he does with film is whatever he did with canvas or a panel or what have you.

H-RAMA. I have seen all of his movies and his being an artist and having a vision definitely comes through but the problem in the United States unfortunately is people want to be entertained and they miss a lot of that, and I’ve been reading a lot of articles where people are deadpanning his newest movie and I watched it last night and I thought it was  brilliant, because the way he films and the way he sees things is a lot different.  You can feel it, you can see it and I hate the aspect of this culture where you have to just basically give people the watered down easy to understand version or it just doesn’t settle with them well.

BG. You should produce or direct a movie based on your knowledge of humans.  Not give people what you think they should have.

H-RAMA. Right! No matter how disgusting his characters or no matter how brutal an image he portrays on the screen, film and art is to evoke emotion. So he’s evoking if he’s making you sick or making you laugh or making you angry, he’s still evoking an emotion and that ‘s part of art and always has been.  I guess that people are losing the concept of art and it’s all about an easy to understand aesthetic.

BG. Ah..That’s very correct. But let’s put it this way also that people don’t know.  People want to be entertained as you said, but they don’t know movie making.  Don’t work for people.  Work for yourself.

H-RAMA. And I think that’s what he does.

BG. Exactly..Because he is an artist.

H-RAMA. I’m with you 100%. There’s no suspense, there’s no aspects that we saw in the early movies, but again, you gotta go back to where the iconic actors of these different ages of film were primarily stage coming into film so they brought that character and they brought that character and personality that’s just not there.

BG. They projected on film the way they projected it on stage.  They gave it out to the people.  They offered it to the people.  They didn’t work for the people.  They projected well, because it is part of the art.  Theater, stage actors or movies or what have you projected.

H-RAMA. I guess this may be difficult to answer and you may not want to.  You’ve had an incredible career full of incredibly iconic imagery. what goes through your mind when.. I was looking through your book getting ready for this, kind of refreshing my mind on your images and I saw the concept pieces you did for the postage stamps……

BG. Oh right.

H-RAMA. They are absolutely gorgeous.  I guess that’s the thing, I look at your aesthetic and I look at what you do and it’s beautiful.  These are supposed to be monsters and you make everything beautiful.  I did a little research and looked at the stamps that actually came out and saw that someone had emulated your style…

BG. What happened is, the first set were the stamps that I created and that was my proposal to the postal authorities, and all of them were composed and created by me. Sarah Karloff called me and Lugosi Junior called me and the great grandson of Cheney and all of them said we would love to have our parents on stamps and would you do anything for us to sell, and I did everything, I created everything, I had worked in advertising and publication and I did a lot of editorial illustrations, and each one is a composition.  Each one.  Especially when I pick black and whites inside black and white illustrations, black and white double pages you have to build a story but also compose space.  Some of it had to be allotted for the lettering.  All of it had to leave space for a headline and so on and they had to be well executed and I had a great experience in layout. But the point is it was my idea to put the signature on the stamps and it was also…do you have the book with the signatures?

H-RAMA.. I have the Famous Monster Movie art book….

BG. Oh alright, in the special edition, there are 16 additional pages which you may not have, I don’t know. But you will see the stamps in their original shape.

H-RAMA. The rectangular ones?

BG. Rectangular but they included the man’s signature, they also included the date of birth and date of death and the price in the corner and I made or allowed everything to be in it.  Which I envisioned a long horizontal stamp.  Which I thought was really creative.

H-RAMA. They’re gorgeous.

BG. As it turned out, the postal authorities did understand, but when it came to the art, they said we have an in house artist, the postal authorities, which was years ago, were printing stamps for 25 countries, that’s something that the public doesn’t know. Like Elvis Presley in Angola, but you know it’s the same treatment more or less, that’s why you’ll see stamps that look alike.  It’s the same person that does them or the same sort of school does it so they all have something in common.  Likeness, which I did not want.  I wanted my own thing but they wanted their artist to do them and they were single heads, but they were good.

H-RAMA. I had to do a lot of research to make sure they weren’t the ones that you were creating, because they emulated your style so closely, and I think that’s the thing that bothered me was that yours are gorgeous and beautiful and I wondered if you had done these because I got these when they came out I got a first edition of them and they came with big cards that have the image on them and I thought for some reason these don’t look right to me…

BG. The man that did the stamps actually wrote something really nice about me in the book which is great.  He’s one of my fans and I like his work.  The thing is I live in color.

H-RAMA. in the forward of the book you have a charcoal drawing of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein that’s beautiful, it’s interesting to look at this and the color and see the depth of it and the beauty of the line.

BG. I love spontaneity, I love freshness, I love individuality.  Everything I do is different from everything I did before.  If you flip through the book quickly you will see with each illustration or painting that they are all different.  I seem to have a signature, not signature in name, but signature in hand and brush.

H-RAMA. Your style comes through in every piece.

BG. I see compassion, I see feelings.  Even the most atrocious monster to me has feelings.  It wants to survive and the first thought we have is to kill it.  Humanity should be given, even to a monster.  I am very careful to portray them as living things, not hateful things, but living things.

H-RAMA. For instance in the Frankenstein drawing (in the Famous monsters book), you can see the sadness.

BG. Yes, there’s feeling and emotion.  There’s compassion in it.  When you see his eyes, they’re very sad.

H-RAMA. In the movies you got the feeling of the monster that didn’t want to be alive and couldn’t understand but in the illustration you feel that emotion.  It’s not a moving picture, you’re portraying something in a two dimensional space conveying all the emotions it took a movie to make.

BG. Compassion is the word.  I make them as real as I can.  The thing I love most is color.  If you look at the portrait of Robert Mitchum,  that was done many years ago, I was eighteen years old and I hadn’t gone to art school yet, but I had this sense of color.  If you look at it, it’s all jazzed up with blues, greens, purples and that’s what makes it.  There were a lot of things I didn’t know because I hadn’t gone to school.  After I had gone to school I learned what was wrong with that portrait but I’m so proud of it because I did it so young.

H-RAMA. I know you love the work you have done and the monsters and the characters, but do you ever want to have that part of your work to be set aside for a little bit so people can take notice of all of your other work?

BG. Not really, I have visions of doing other things of course, classical art or fine art.  I have a number of paintings I want to do.  I do monsters now because people want to see me do monsters and not only that, I have commissions one after another and in a way there’s no time to do anything else although I would love to sit down and do something that’s completely different in the way that the old masters painted.  I have studied for many years, as a matter of fact I should have been a fine artist but I became a commercial artist and that’s fine.

H-RAMA. Considering the quality of your portraits and illustrations don’t you think that there is a fine line between commercial and fine art?

BG. I like reality, I like life, so did the masters.  When you go to a museum they’re all teaching you.  Every picture you look at teaches you something.  The artist talks to you, all of them are still alive from Rubens to Rembrandt.  Every time you look at a picture you’re lost in their thoughts.  The energy that you feel when you leave the museum is because they spoke to you.  I have done this for many years.  I consider all of them my friends.  It sounds crazy but I feel the energy that they give me because they are showing me things, they point out things that I haven’t forgotten.  You see things that you may have overlooked perhaps.  You go to the studio and you are all charged up, so I consider these people my teachers.  I work everyday.  As soon as the sun is up.  I need sunlight.  I could talk about art all night long.  In school we used to argue late at night.

H-RAMA. What was your reaction to realizing the love for your work?

BG. A great appreciation, it’s a God given gift that I am thankful for.  I would have put it to even better use and have done more with it.  I am just very happy to do that over anything else.  I am very grateful.

Basil Gogos’ book “Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos” is available at bookstores and online at Amazon.com.