Gahan Wilson

I can't remember with whom I was having the conversation, but Gahan Wilson came up. Everything I've ever seen of his just instantly made sense to me. I absolutely love it all. From an interview in Locus:

One other interesting thing: in a puritan society such as ours, if you do humor or horror in any artistic thing, it is automatically considered to be less than if it's 'serious.' If it doesn't scare you and it doesn't make you laugh, it's 'serious.' If the artist gets scary or he gets silly, the critical tendency is to say, 'That's a minor work.' So it was a bitch for Edgar Allen Poe or Mark Twain to get serious recognition. They finally managed to do it, because they did some of the best stuff around, but it was an uphill struggle.

Art should lead to change in the way we see things. If some artist comes up with a vision which gives a new opening, it usually creates a lot of stress, because it's frightening. Like Cubism reveals there's this whole other reality to reality, or Stravinsky comes along, and there's a riot! This is art. It's very disturbing. If you really see a Cézanne, you never see anything the same way afterwards. It's heavy stuff, very powerful. And the artist – literary, graphic, or whatever – does an amazing thing. The creative artist is automatically an outsider, because he sees through the world that everybody else takes as the final reality, and he's a very scary kind of guy.