The Halloween Season Belongs to Artists
Updated: 19 hours ago
Every October, the wider world takes up art. And it's not just #Inktober, either, though that's a big one and comes highly recommended!
Evidence is everywhere.
Accountants are out in the early dusk carving faces into squash. Soccer-moms are turning plastic jack-o-lanterns into terracotta with viral paint. Dogwalkers hot-glue moss onto cardboard tombstones.
Have you seen your neighbour? A man who has owned the same beige windbreaker since 1990? He's spent three full weekends building a nine-foot skeleton with articulated fingers. (He will tell you about the fingers if you let him.)
For one month a year, everyone becomes an installation artist.
And the rest of us, the folks who do this all year long, get to feel oddly normal.
Let me make my case.
We got here first
Did you know, long before anyone thought of carving a pumpkin, the jack-o'-lantern was the hard-as-a-rock turnip?
Now who would have done such a thing?
In Ireland, people hollowed out turnips and other root vegetables and carved faces into them to ward off evil spirits.
That's who.
If you've ever seen one, maybe in Ireland's Museum of Country Life where there are a few, you'll understand why the spirits stayed the heck away.
All I'm saying is a carved turnip doesn't look in any way festive. It looks like it knows where you sleep, so....
When Irish immigrants reached America in the nineteenth century, they found pumpkins: bigger, softer, a less livid and cadaverous colour. And far more forgiving under the knife!
The whole art form switched mediums. That, friends, is the oldest artist story there is. Someone finds a better canvas, and nobody looks back.
(Well. Almost nobody. During the great pumpkin shortage of 2015, English Heritage encouraged people in the UK to revive the turnip. Bold. Brave. Potentially tasty.)
Artists know little darkness has its appeal
In 1781, a Swiss-born painter named Henry Fuseli painted a woman asleep across a bed, with a squat demon perched on her chest and a wild-eyed horse peering through the curtains.
He called it The Nightmare.
When it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1782, the critics responded with what is usually described as horrified fascination, which is the very best kind of horrified anything. Usually. Fuseli sold the painting itself for twenty guineas. Then the engravings went out, and the publisher made more than 500 pounds on them.
And, oh, let me tell you, the caricaturists went wild. For years afterward, satirists like Rowlandson and Cruikshank kept putting politicians a-swoon on that bed. Napoleon included. The demon kept his seat (and warmed his feet).
The lesson here is twofold. A good haunting is a sound business plan. And perhaps hold onto your print rights.
Some of us 'decorate' all year
Every October, someone asks whether I've decorated for Halloween yet, and I have to resist the urge to gesture vaguely at my studio.
Francisco Goya would understand.
In his seventies, Goya painted fourteen murals directly onto the walls of his house outside Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo. Today they’re called the Black Paintings. One of them is Saturn Devouring His Son, and together they decorated his dining and sitting rooms.
His dining room, okay?
Imagine going over for supper. Please, sit. Don't mind Saturn starting without us.
Goya never titled the paintings, or if he did, he never told anyone. They weren't commissioned and they weren't meant for the public. They were for him. Decades later, they were lifted from the walls, transferred to canvas, and today they hang in the Prado.
So when someone asks me whether my skeletons are seasonal, I give the answer I like to think Goya would have given.
Define seasonal.
Satire in a very nice hat
Around 1910, the Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada etched a skeleton in a grand, flower-laden hat.
She was satire, aimed squarely at the fashionable upper-class women of the Porfirio Díaz era.
Posada died in 1913. He never saw what his little skeleton would become.
The name Calavera Catrina attached itself to her around 1930. Diego Rivera gave her a place of honour in a mural in the late 1940s. Today, La Catrina is one of the best-loved symbols of Día de los Muertos, an icon of Mexican identity recognized around the world.
A zinc etching. A joke at the expense of the rich. A century later, she's immortal.
That's how art works. You make something small and sharp and true, and you send it out into the dark. You don't get to decide how far it travels.
Why this season is ours
Halloween is the one time of year the world agrees with what artists have always known.
That shadows can be beautiful. That a mask can tell the truth better than a face. That the things we fear are worth looking at -- carefully, in good light, with a cup of something warm.
Art has always been where people go to meet the dark safely. Fuseli knew it. Goya ate supper with it. Somehow. Posada dressed it up and brought it to the party.
Every October, the rest of the world remembers.
Collectors understand this better than most. Some of the most treasured pieces in any collection are the uneasy ones -- the paintings people cross a room to stand in front of, and then can't stop thinking about on the drive home. That unease is a kind of intimacy. The artist trusted you with something they were afraid of, and you chose to keep it.
At Studio Eclipse, we think about this a lot. (The name alone should tell you we're comfortable with a little darkness.) The pieces that stay with collectors aren't always the pretty ones. Often, they're the ones with a little shadow in them -- the ones that look back.
So this season, carve the pumpkin. Wear the hat. And if a painting in a gallery makes the back of your neck prickle...
That's not a warning.
That's an invitation.
Tracy Eire
PS - All pieces but the tormented Santa Claus available here.
PPS - Ahem. Pls pardon the dark humour!
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