Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #216449 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Synopsis
An intimate photographic tour of Edward Gorey's strange and wonderful house, this publication includes previously unpublished works by Gorey.

Customer Reviews

HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS.
Elephant House: Or, the Home of Edward Gorey.

This beautifully produced book is an intimate photographic portrait of Edward Gorey's strange and wonderous abode. Kevin McDermott's records a lifetime of oddness by representing Gorey's personal world that few people were privileged to enter.
The "Elephant House", a timber building in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod was where the artist lived for the last 21 years of his life. In his lifetime he wrote and illustrated over a hundred peculiar tales that have delighted his fans for over fifty years.

The book illustrates in exquisite detail pretty much what appears to be nearly every room in the house. The camera lingers on a city of salt and pepper pots, the remnants of an old sofa ripped to sheds by dozens of crazy cats, and most bizarrely of all a toilet shaped like an elephant's head.

Of most interest for me was the 'studio'. A small, non-descript room with a plain table and window blocked with shrubbery in order to concentrate the mind was where it all happened. Every little drawing from the 80's onwards, was composed on that three foot square table with Indian ink and a stack of Bristol board. On this simple, almost monastic, scribes table are carefully written to do lists, frog shaped brush holders and an odd creature emerging from a spaghetti of doodled lines.

The immense library of books, cassettes and videos, odd shaped pieces of wood, painted eggs and piles of stones shows graphically how obsessive Gorey was with collecting. But these are collections not archived, curated and locked away but displayed almost as art forms, generating new shapes as a collective that must have delighted Gorey in their construction. Thus, these images show how Gorey's imagination and creativeness came to play in everything he touched.

Also contained in the book are illustrations of 14 unpublished elephant etchings and drawings along with new biographical insights into Gorey's life from his long time friend Kevin McDermott.

This is a moving tribute to a renaissance man in the truest sense of the word and a must have for all Gorey fans.