A Very Gorey Art Mystery

Season 3, Episode 8,   Oct 31, 2021, 07:09 PM

Edward St. John Gorey is known for his pen and ink drawings, and for authoring and illustrating short often disturbing books. Making the reader uneasy was intended! Listen to this episode to follow him to the Ballet, Cape Cod, art flea markets--and uncover what genre he was aiming for with his books. Want an early clue? It wasn't horror.

Just over two decades ago Edward St. John Gorey left us to follow the path taken by the doomed Gashlycrumb Tinies. A Pisces, he was born in February of 1925 he used his pen and ink drawings to invite us into his cross-hatched Edwardian and Victorian styled stories. 

  • E is for Edward who attended the ballet
  • G is for Gorey who poked the bear with his story
If you haven’t seen his drawings please, please, check out the Whispering Gallery podcast on Instagram. His drawings didn’t always spell out everything for us which left us to draw our own conclusions About how the story was actually going down. And while there seems to be an immediate response to categorize his work as macabre or horror, that may not be entirely the case. 

There is a very Edward Gorey mystery to be investigated. Were his drawings meant to be designated to and locked in the genre of horror and the macabre or was there something else that he was shooting for? In the book Ascending Peculiarity he states: 

Quote “Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.” Unquote

Edward left things not shown in his drawings. Allowing us to draw our own conclusions. For example in most of the Gashlycrumb Tinies illustrations, you see the problematic situation that the tinies face, but mostly you don’t see them experiencing their end. B is for Basil assaulted by bears and he is being surrounded by two very large bears, that is all you see. One of the bears is stepping closer. However there is no mistaking R is for Rhoda!

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