Friday, December 9, 2011

Edward Gorey Tree's

We are getting closer and closer to my actual Halloween nails!!! Aren't you so excited? They are probably my favorite nails ever. But for now, here are some Edward Gorey inspired trees.  Edward Gorey is one of my favorite author/artists. If you aren't familiar with him, he is infamous for writing very macabre picture books. If you were to just glace at his work you might think it was a children's book, which I suppose it could be, but an adult would truly see the sadness in his art. A lot of people compare him to Charles Addams (you know, The Addams Family), but I never really saw it. I always felt that Gorey had a melancholy surrounding his work where as Addams was much more humorous (if you're not really into macabre things, you might disagree with me on this one). Some of my favorite works by Gorey include The Doubtful Guest, The Epiplectic Bicycle, L'Heure Bleue, The Hapless Child, The Remembered Visit, and probably most significantly his illustrations for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S.Eliot, which is the collection of poems that were the inspiration for the Broadway musical Cats!

For these nails I took inspiration from his most famous work which is The Gashlycrumb Tinies which is the alphabetic stories of 26 children's deaths. Below I included "K is for Kate who was struck with an axe," because the trees in this image were my main inspiration. Also, I totally just noticed that "an axe" is completely wrong gramatically... I guess he was just trying really hard to maintain the couplets since, "L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks."

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