Scot D. Ryersson
"I consider myself an archaeologist of the arcane, a preservationist of the bizarre, a taxidermist of dreams. Humbly, I lay before you all that I have discovered travelling darker and curious byways. The relics I have returned with are evidence—faint echoes of desecrated realms and passions long interred. May they prove the existence of what was wrongly believed the stuff of but fevered imagination only."
Scot D. Ryersson (1960-2024) began his training at the prestigious Chelsea School of Art and Design (London) before entering the field of motion picture advertising. Throughout his thirty-year career, living in Sydney, New York, Toronto, and London, he has designed multi-award-winning graphics for numerous Hollywood and international films, including The Silence of the Lambs, Ghost, The Doors, The Changeling, White Mischief, The Hunt for Red October, and Witness. Ryersson’s campaigns for Evil Under the Sun and Another Country each garnered an Art Directors of London Award. His pen-and-ink illustrations have appeared in publications worldwide. In 2007, he created Arcanifacts, his mixed-media, assemblage, and collage pieces, to further explore his artistic obsession with the arcane and phantasmagorical. In 2010, Ryersson’s book jacket design for Anne Brooke’s novel A Dangerous Man was nominated for both an Imperial Artisan and a Rainbow Award, and he was commissioned specifically by director/producer John Borowski to create props for the 2012 documentary Carl Panzram.
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Ryersson is also the author of numerous critiques and essays on film and literature. He has published exclusive interviews with author Anne Rice, actress Diana Rigg, Poirot actor David Suchet, Marple actress Joan Hickson, and film director Tim Burton; an analysis of the little known supernatural fiction of Agatha Christie; a cover-story of the life and work of Brigitte Helm, star of Fritz Lang’s silent screen classic Metropolis; as well as the novellas Poisoned Ivy, The Arsenic Flower, and Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know, and the 1PFR nominated short story Summer’s Lease. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker. With his partner, Michael Orlando Yaccarino, Ryersson is co-author of the internationally best-selling biography Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati and a play based upon it; the decadent fairy tale The Princess of Wax: A Cruel Tale; and the art book The Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a Muse. Ryersson and Yaccarino have also co-edited Spectral Haunts and Phantom Lovers, a collection of British ghost stories, which Ryersson illustrated.