Asked what attracted her to movie monster portraits, two decades into her art career, Lorraine Brinit Bush name drops Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley, then quotes part of "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

	"Dracula" by Lorraine Brinit Bush, one of her color paintings of famous movie stills. Her work goes on display at Gallerie Chiz in Shadyside starting Friday. Click photo for larger image.

They all shared a sense of terror, she said, which she tries to get across in her color paintings of famous stills and characters from classic horror films.

"I thought these movies brought that [terror] alive, in my mind ... I don't like the blood and gore that they do [now]. This is subtle black and white terror that I colorize," she said this week.

Shadyside's Gallerie Chiz opens Bush's first gallery show Friday, a Halloween-themed show that also includes puppets and masks by Cheryl Capezzuti.

Until now, most of Bush's oil on canvas paintings -- based on old horror movie stills and scenarios -- have been displayed at movie conventions. For reproduction purposes, she also has sold images to the estates of actors Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

She does the portraits in her Trafford studio, often using live models dressed in costumes. Her customers, she said, run the gamut from black-clad Goth kids to regular-looking people you might see at the grocery store.

Bush is breaking out of that scene with Friday's show. "Maybe the show will renew interest in some of the old films with the general public," she said.

Bush grew up in Johnstown and graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 1972. Two years later she left La Roche College with a bachelor's in art and design.

Although she always a monster movie fan, the first two decades of her career were devoted to commercial art work -- getting hired to paint book covers, commemorative plates and the like. She said commercial work increasingly became computerized, which did not interest her, so she began focusing on movie monster portraits in the early 1990s.

She won her first award at a Famous Monsters of Filmland Convention in Virginia in 1993. Bush's father suggested she name the winning painting -- of Dracula about to fill up on a victim's blood -- "Self Service."

The Halloween show at Gallerie Chiz, 5831 Ellsworth Ave. in Shadyside, runs from Friday through Nov. 4.