Gavin L. O'Keefe | |
---|---|
Born | Melbourne, Australia |
Occupation | illustrator, author |
Nationality | Australian |
Gavin L. O'Keefe [1] is an Australian-born book illustrator and designer. He resided in the USA for a number of years, returning to live in Australia in 2018. O'Keefe has been the dustjacket designer and illustrator, and occasional commissioning editor, for US publisher Ramble House for 25 years.
Gavin O'Keefe was born in Melbourne and lived in Sydney from the early-1980s to 1990. During that period, his artwork (usually black and white, though sometimes colour) was included in a variety of non-fiction books, science-fiction and horror magazines and other publications. His earliest covers were for books by Australian writers Jacob G. Rosenberg, Alex Skovron, Walter Adamson, and Ian Kennedy Williams.
O'Keefe is a classically trained musician and plays the viola.
O'Keefe's illustrative work has appeared in many publications, including Aphelion, Crypt of Cthulhu, Culture Magazine (illustrated serial "Down the Rabbit Hole"), Eidolon, Esoterica, Phantastique, Scarp, Shadowplay, 24 Hours (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Terror Australis , Theosophy in Australia and Wildfire. He has also provided illustrations for anthologies such as Terror Australis: Best Australian Horror , and for The Australian H.P. Lovecraft Calendar 1990.
He contributed illustrations to Sally B. Boillotat's Polocrosse: Australian Made, Internationally Played (1990). His cover designs appear on Ian Kennedy Williams' Stopping Over (1988), Walter Adamson's The Man With the Suitcase (1989), Roslyn Taylor's Uncle Abe (1989), Peter Coaldrake and J.R. Nethercote's What Should Government Do? (1989) and John Leonard's Contemporary Australian Poetry: An Anthology. (1990)
Other works include Eight Illustrations for the Gormenghast Books by Mervyn Peake . . This was followed in 1995 by O'Keefe's illustrated version of Lewis Carroll's classic The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits . His continued interest in illustrating Carroll is evinced by his 2004 compilation A Snark Selection (Ramble House).
O'Keefe's first illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland (subtitled 'The GO Alice') were published in Melbourne in 1990 by the Carroll Foundation. In a review of this volume, it was stated "the hardbound volume intrigues the reader from the first glance at the mysterious black and red dustjacket. O'Keefe's illustrations are stark black and white drawings which have some of the foreboding one expects in Edgar Allan Poe. There is a humor here also, and though there is nothing particularly Australian about these drawings, there is much that we have not seen before, and the collector of innovative illustrated editions will certainly want to add this to his shelf." [2] A new edition of 'The GO Alice' with entirely new illustrations was published by Ramble House in 2011.
O'Keefe has a longstanding interest in the art of Australian painters Norma Bull and Vali Myers. He has also written essays on writers and artists, such as "Sita and Salome: A Short Comparative Look at the Art of Aubrey Beardsley and Mervyn Peake" in Peake Studies 2, No 3 (Winter 1991) and "Alice's Odyssey in Oz", Oz Arts 7 (1993).
O’Keefe has illustrated Philip José Farmer’s The Green Odyssey and Love Song, William Blake's An Island in the Moon (Purple Mouth Press), Aleister Crowley's The Poem and Leanne Frahm's Borderline (MirrorDanse Books). He designed the cover for the Lovecraftian novel Marblehead by Richard A. Lupoff, published by Ramble House , and cover designs for the novels of Harry Stephen Keeler. (O'Keefe is the cover designer at Ramble House and has been prolific in designing their covers since the turn of the century.) He is also one of the publisher's commissioning editors.
Time Line: Selected Illustrations (Ramble House, 2010) collects a range of O'Keefe's illustrations from his first four decades, including designs inspired by the macabre stories of H. P. Lovecraft, Tod Robbins and Edgar Allan Poe, illustrations for science-fiction works by Richard A. Lupoff, Robert Sheckley and Philip José Farmer, drawings for the ‘nonsense’ stories of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, drawings inspired by the music of King Crimson, Queen and Brian Eno, cover illustrations for mystery novels by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Mark Hansom, Walter S. Masterman, Richard E. Goddard and Arlton Eadie, and a range of fairy and fantasy art.
A new edition of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with O'Keefe's black-&-white illustrations was released by Ramble House in 2013; these illustrations follow the symbolism of Theosophy and the Tarot.
O'Keefe's English translation, with numerous black-&-white illustrations, of Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror was published by Ramble House in 2018, entitled The Dirges of Maldoror .
Ramsey Campbell: Masters of the Weird Tale (Centipede Press, 2020) includes four new illustrations by O'Keefe, among a host of other illustrators.
O'Keefe is currently working on a third illustrated edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, this time in 'radioactive' colour.
Sir John Tenniel was an English illustrator, graphic humourist and political cartoonist prominent in the second half of the 19th century. An alumnus of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, he was knighted for artistic achievements in 1893, the first such honour ever bestowed on an illustrator or cartoonist.
"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of the Looking-Glass world.
Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.
The Hunting of the Snark, subtitled An Agony, in Eight fits, is a poem by the English writer Lewis Carroll. It is typically categorised as a nonsense poem. Written between 1874 and 1876, it borrows the setting, some creatures, and eight portmanteau words from Carroll's earlier poem "Jabberwocky" in his children's novel Through the Looking-Glass (1871).
The Annotated Alice is a 1960 book by Martin Gardner incorporating the text of Lewis Carroll's major tales, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), as well as the original illustrations by John Tenniel. It has extensive annotations explaining the contemporary references, mathematical concepts, word play, and Victorian traditions featured in the two books.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 English children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. It is seen as an example of the literary nonsense genre. The artist John Tenniel provided 42 wood-engraved illustrations for the book.
Alice is a fictional character and the main protagonist of Lewis Carroll's children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). A child in the mid-Victorian era, Alice unintentionally goes on an underground adventure after falling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland; in the sequel, she steps through a mirror into an alternative world.
A bandersnatch is a fictional creature in Lewis Carroll's 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass and his 1874 poem The Hunting of the Snark. Although neither work describes the appearance of a bandersnatch in great detail, in The Hunting of the Snark, it has a long neck and snapping jaws, and both works describe it as ferocious and extraordinarily fast. Through the Looking-Glass implies that bandersnatches may be found in the world behind the looking-glass, and in The Hunting of the Snark, a bandersnatch is found by a party of adventurers after crossing an ocean. Bandersnatches have appeared in various adaptations of Carroll's works; they have also been used in other authors' works and in other forms of media.
Harry Furniss was a British illustrator. He established his career on the Illustrated London News before moving to Punch. He also illustrated Lewis Carroll's novel Sylvie and Bruno.
Barry Moser is an American visual artist and educator, known as a printmaker specializing in wood engravings, and an illustrator of numerous works of literature. He is also the owner and operator of the Pennyroyal Press, an engraving and small book publisher founded in 1970.
The Nursery "Alice" (1889/90) is an abridged version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, adapted by the author himself for children "from nought to five". It includes 20 of John Tenniel's illustrations from the original book, redrawn, enlarged, coloured – and, in some cases, revised – by Tenniel himself. The book was published by Macmillan a quarter-century after the original Alice. It features new illustrated front and back covers in full colour by E. Gertrude Thomson, who was a good friend of Carroll. The book was 'engraved and printed' by the famous colour printer Edmund Evans.
Chris Riddell is a South African-born English illustrator and occasional writer of children's books and a political cartoonist for the Observer. He has won three Kate Greenaway Medals – the British librarians' annual award for the best-illustrated children's book, and two of his works were commended runners-up, a distinction dropped after 2002.
Alice Bolingbroke Woodward (1862–1951) was an English artist and illustrator. She was one of the most prolific illustrators at the turn of the 20th century and is known mainly for her work in children's literature, and secondarily for her scientific illustrations.
John Vernon Lord is an illustrator, author and teacher. He is widely recognized for his illustrations of various texts such as Aesop's Fables,The Nonsense Verse of Edward Lear; and the Folio Society's Myths and Legends of the British Isles. He has also illustrated classics of English literature, including the works of Lewis Carroll and James Joyce.
Bessie Pease Gutmann was an American artist and illustrator, most noted for her paintings of putti, infants, and young children. During the early 1900s she was one of the better-known magazine and book illustrators in the United States. Her artwork was featured on 22 magazine covers such as Woman's Home Companion and McCall's between 1906 and 1920. She also illustrated popular children's books including a notable 1907 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Although the commercial popularity of Gutmann's art declined during World War II, there was renewed interest in her illustrations from collectors by the late 20th century.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and reluctant Anglican deacon. His most notable works are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems Jabberwocky (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876) are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. Some of Alice's nonsensical wonderland logic reflects his published work on mathematical logic.
Ramble House is a small American publisher founded by Fender Tucker and Jim Weiler in 1999. The press specializes in reprints of long-neglected and rare crime fiction novels, modern crime fiction, 'weird menace' / 'shudder pulps' - short story collections from rare pulp magazines, scholarly works by noted authors on the crime fiction genre, and a host of other diverse books of a collectible or curious nature. Apart from its main publishing arm, Ramble House has two imprints: Surinam Turtle Press and Dancing Tuatara Press, headed by author Richard A. Lupoff and John Pelan respectively.
There are more than 100 illustrators of English-language editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), with many other artists for non-English language editions. The illustrator for the original editions was John Tenniel, whose illustrations for Alice and Looking Glass are among the best known illustrations ever published.
Amy Millicent Sowerby (1878–1967) was an English painter and illustrator, known for her illustrations of classic children's stories such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and A Child's Garden of Verses, her postcards featuring children, nursery rhymes, and Shakespeare scenes, and children's books created with her sister Githa Sowerby.
Justin Galland Schiller is an American bookseller specializing in rare and collectible children's books; proprietor during his student days under his own name (1960–69), then Justin G. Schiller, Ltd. (1969–2020). Headquartered in New York City, it was the oldest specialist firm in the United States, focusing on historical and collectible children's books, related original art, and manuscripts. In 1988, he formed a second corporation—Battledore Ltd, with his partner and spouse Dennis M V David, to further specialize in original children's book illustration art and the legacy of Maurice Sendak.