Edgar Allen Poe - Reading Research

I got quite into Edgar Allen Poe's work and have read a fair few of the short stories (although not any of the poems), my favourites being 'The Pit and The Pendulum' , 'The Man Who Was Used Up', 'The Fall Of The House Of Usher', 'The Tell Tale Heart' and 'Ligeia'. I am interested in things which are strange or uncanny and Edgar Allen Poe's work seems to be chiefly concerned with exactly that, he describes the feeling of being horrified or disturbed by something in such an intense way, which, whilst occasionally bordering on hammy, I usually find very convincing. 

   




































This is a painting I made depicting part of the opening of 'The Pit and The Pendulum' which I am very happy with. The excerpt I used was as follows:

“I saw the lips of the black robed judges. They appeared to me white – whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words – and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness – of immovable resolution -of stern contempt of human torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me was fate, were still issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I shuddered because no sound succeeded."

I had only just started trying to paint recently when I made this and it turned out better than I expected, i think I captured the mood well by boiling the image down to the most essential representation of what was being described.  

   











































This an oil pastel piece I made in response to 'The Man Who Was Used Up', in which the narrator describes meeting an enigmatic war hero named John A.B.C, but hasn't heard how it was he became a war hero and becomes obsessed with finding out how it happened only for whomever he asks to be interrupted at the crucial point in the story every time he gets close. He finally meets the man himself again with intention of finally finding out and discovers that during a battle he lost most of his body parts and has to be pretty much completely assembled from prosthetic parts. I attempted to render this in oil pastel and i quite like it but not nearly as much as with the piece, for which I had a clearer vision. For this piece i think I relied too much on the media i was using and expected that to do more me than it actually ended up doing.

For some reason I stopped making work in response to Poe and just sort of trailed off, losing interest. I've taken this as a sign, even though I thought for a while that I might end choosing him, that I wouldn't want to be making work in response to his writing for a long time.