Ashleigh Talbot Gregor

Ashleigh Talbot Gregor [aka Madame Talbot]
1959 – 2026
Graphic Designer

She had found her first funereal excitement at age five when she
witnessed a great aunt run across a cemetery sobbing, then leap onto the
casket before it went in the ground. Down in the church basement, little
cousins arm-wrestled for toys and jewelry from the estate.

Her early macabre interest was not rewarded. In grade school, she was
sent to counseling for cutting out shrunken heads from Life Magazine.
Concerned teachers wanted to know why she had sneakily cut a “House
on Haunted Hill” ad from the newspaper. She was made to stand in the
corner for doodling too much on her notebooks, but in her own room at
home she spent hours drawing and making strings of paper skeletons.

Between her parents' paydays, there was a lot of mayonnaise on bread.
Payday, though, might bring steak at a restaurant. It was a feast when
Dad brought home a whole carton of potato chips that must have fallen
off of a truck. Better times arrived when he got his dream job: working
graveyard-shift security at Hanford. Sometimes he would take her out to
hang with him in the guard shack or let her ride up and down on the lift
in the Hanford Atomic Plant auto garage.

As a teen she decided that she was not going to be taking in laundry
like her mom. Her first jobs were in a bakery and as a hotel maid, but
she was looking for better. In response to an ad on a bulletin board ad,
she claimed skills she didn’t have, landing a job as art director at a
local TV
station, where she stayed after hours to study and then direct the live
news cameras twice a day. She worked in printing and learned how to run
letterpress, offset press, darkroom, stat camera and pasteup. Later she
taught herself simple html and created her own website.

She did pasteup at Seattle’s Rocket Magazine and the Weekly. Her header
and spot illustrations were signed with the little Triangle/Slash by
which she was known. In her wild emotive drawing style she collaborated
with Jesse Bernstein and William S Burroughs. She hand-drew the original
Archie McPhee’s logo and did sign painting and logo design.

If you thought you had a wild story, she’d mention that Robert Crumb had
visited her when he was in town. If you tried to top her, she would pull
out her story of helping Wilum H Pugmire deal with the drugs and the
body in the middle of the night after his young junkie boyfriend overdosed.

Ashleigh was a spinning top. When everything was good, she shot out
sparks. In 1999, she and her husband moved to Astoria. Ashleigh loved
Astoria and life was good. She created most of her posters there--one
year she drew fourteen. She liked the idea that Astoria was full of
artists but she didn’t want to meet any. She’d had enough of that in
Seattle. She had work to do.

She and her husband started a publishing business built around her. She
didn’t want to promote it. There would be no signed limited editions.
Hers were affordable posters for kids and the working class, like the
posters of her youth. Old-school printing quality, not digital. No one
needed to know who she was; people would just look at a poster and want it.

She loved to create self-imposed deadlines and often would do
all-nighters to make the deadline. She seemed to live on a 26- or
27-hour day, going till she got to her old favorite, graveyard shift.

Ashleigh tried social media a few times, but someone was always asking a
question she didn’t have time for or wanting a “like.” Too many selfies
and drama.

She designed posters for the Mutter Museum, the Pharmacy Museum, the
Surgeon’s Museum, the Museum of Death and Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. She
created a Jake the Alligator Man poster and bumper sticker. Her posters
were sold at the then-new Sunday Market for a couple of years. Marsh’s
Free Museum was the first place to carry her posters and still does.

When a Texas developer was trying to build an LNG terminal at the mouth
of the Columbia River, Ashleigh whipped up fantastic protest signs and
ads for the Daily Astorian.

Ashleigh was a Seattle graphic designer for 16 years, a Nashville
graphic designer and Hatch Show Press operator for 1 year, and then
lived and created posters for 27 years in Astoria, Oregon, with husband
Jan Gregor and her beloved cats.

Sadly, a rare blood cancer ravished her body until she had fractures in
nearly every vertebra. The spinning top wobbled until it finally fell over.

She wanted no service. Madame Talbot supported animal charities.