 Edward Gory was an artist best known for his quirky and witty illustrations. Scott Nash, the chair of the illustration department at Mecca, talked about a new exhibit of Gory's work at the Portland Public Library, which shows why he is considered one of America's most imaginative and eccentric artists. Scott, most people are familiar with Edward Gory through the Adventist family and perhaps the opening for Masterpiece Mystery, but he has a lot more in his work than that. Talk about him and his career a little bit. Yeah, he does have a reputation for being rather macabre and actually is associated with horror to some degree largely because of his sets for Dracula, the book that he did that was particularly popular called The Gashley Crumbed Tiny's Where Horrible Things Happen to Little Kids. And as you mentioned, the opening for Mystery. What I'm particularly proud of with this exhibition is that it really shows more of the broad range of Edward Gory. Besides his penchant for the macabre, he was also very dedicated to nonsense, absurdism, and he had definitely a sense of whimsy as well to his work. And I think that's one of the very exciting aspects of this particular exhibition, which has been very aptly named Elegant Enigmas, which I think really captures the quality of his work. And he was more than just an illustrator. He was a writer. He did costume and set designs. He was, and I'm an earthing more and more about him. I mean, I've been following Gory for many years, but through this exhibition I found out that actually he's evidently apparently written a ballet. He's written an opera that was called The Blue Aspic. It was done in book form, but the idea was creating an opera. He was essentially an extremely well-read man, and he was a voracious reader, really interested in various forms of culture, not just high culture, but low culture as well. And you see that as sort of a mash-up in a lot of the work that he does. A lot of his work, or most of his work is sort of black and white, pen and ink, although there is some color in it. Did he ever do watercolors of the French countryside, or did he always work in pen and ink, black and white? As far as I, he really worked mostly from his head. He didn't really work from photo reference except for, he made some references to liking, believe it or not, the sports pages of the Boston Globe as reference. And I don't know whether he's having fun with us when he says that, but mostly I think most of his work came from his head. He was uncomfortable with color, and all the more reason that I'm very excited about the fact that we do have some color pieces here. We have images of his set designs for the Macado, which are beautiful, colorful. He actually uses, I mean, it's done in his sort of style, but brighter colors than we normally associate with Gory. You have about 180 works here in this exhibit, which is quite extensive. Was it difficult to pick only those 180? It had been curated, and we were, this show has been traveling around a bit, and I'm proud to say that this wonderful space here at the Lewis Gallery, we've only had to cull one piece of his work as one cover that he had done back in the 30s that we pulled actually, I'm sorry, the 60s, but we actually pulled one cover from the exhibition. Otherwise, it's all here. Many people think that he actually lived in the last century, meaning the 19th century, but he was really a 20th century man. He was definitely a 20th century man. I mean, his influences were everything from, yes, obscure 18th century or 19th century British literature. He was a French major at Harvard, but he also was very interested in television sitcoms, and I found references to his love for things like the animated version of Batman that came out in the 1990s. So it's all there in this work, I think. It sounds like you're quite a Renaissance man. He is a Renaissance man, but also in a modern sense of being a Renaissance man. So having looked at all of these, what are some of your favorites? I have some particular favorites here. One that I'm very excited about is that we have some unfinished works of his. We have sketches, which I think was very generous on the part of the gory trust to include some of those images. We also have an unfinished piece, which is an image from the blue aspect, which is fascinating to me from a technical perspective to see how he actually sketched out the drawings. There's also a piece in here that I was not particularly familiar with called Creativity, which I'm going to be mulling over for quite some time. It depicts elephants in different forms in media, everything from smoke to brick, and it's just captioned creativity, and I really am looking to find out more about that as well. There's a lot of creativity, a lot of interesting way of looking at the world, I think, in his work. Oh, yeah. Well, actually, it's not... you know, it's very similar to the way a lot of artists approach looking at the world. We pull together all sorts of information from different sources, different inspirations, and mix it up in a new way, and that's really what he does. He's just done it in his own sort of particular way, and he did it over the course of many, many, many years. And how long is the exhibit here at the library? We're very pleased to have this exhibit here for three months. It's going to be here right through December, so please come on out for it.