Edward Gorey’s Vinegar Works: On Display at The Edward Gorey House
Published in 1963 as a slip-case collection of three books intended to instruct, appall and amuse, The Vinegar Works: Three Volumes of Moral Instruction by Edward Gorey celebrates its golden anniversary this year. A special exhibition of artwork from the three volumes — The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Insect God, and The West Wing — will be on display at The Edward Gorey House.
Nearly all of the drawings from The Vinegar Works will be on exhibit at The Edward Gorey House (sadly, the letters K, L and M from The Gashlycrumb Tinies have vanished over the years). The House will be displaying the original art from the three books together for the first time since Edward Gorey created these iconic images. Individual pieces of art from each of the three books have been included in exhibitions in the past, but all three books have never been displayed together in their entirety.
Even though images from these books have been printed in books and reproduced on everything from lunch boxes to coffee mugs, no printed or computer generated reproduction can compare to the visceral experience of viewing the original artwork in person. When viewed face to face, the artist’s touch in bringing pen to paper can actually be seen and felt in the finished drawings.
In the printing process, every line within a drawing is given equal emphasis and is printed in the same tone of black ink, which flattens the images. Each part of the image is either black or white with no tonal modulation. When viewing the original artwork, the india ink comes alive revealing a depth and richness - heavy pen strokes are actually darker than light feathery lines. In all three suites of drawings being displayed, Mr. Gorey created darkness and shadow by crosshatching and varying the thickness of the line, not by in-painting ink with a brush. This technique of adding multiple layers of lines, one atop the other, creates added depth in the black areas as the paper transforms into a three dimensional pool of ink due to its saturation on the surface. The inky blackness of the color tricks the eye, and the original drawings appear smaller and more concentrated than their printed versions.
Edward Gorey was a month shy of his 35th birthday when he began the artwork for The Gashlycrumb Tinies on Jan 11, 1960. At this time, Mr. Gorey was employed as the art director at Looking Glass Library. Because his day job kept him busy during normal working hours, he created drawings on weekends, in the evenings, and on his days off. A typical drawing for the book would take about a day to ink. Every drawing is dated on the reverse with a start and finish date. These dates indicate that, while some drawings were completed in one day, most were started one day and completed on a second day.