Something Wicked, Something Tender
October arrived the way it always does in the studio. Like a guest who has been standing in the doorway for a week, patient and a little amused, waiting for you to finally notice.
I noticed.
The Scary & Sweet collection started, honestly, as an experiment. I wanted to see if I could hold two things at once: the spooky and the tender, the gothic and the gentle. Halloween, done right, is both. It is the delight of fear. The excitement of standing at the edge of something dark and choosing to lean in a little.
Characters With Opinions
Every painting in this collection has a subject and a story. Spike is a spooky green cat in a spiked collar who is, I suspect, mostly smiling. Edgar is a plague doctor with a beak the color of new leaves, looking out of his oval like he has been expecting you. And then there are the Happy Little Phantoms, five cats under ghost sheets: Pepper, Silly, Rusty, Gracie and Tobias. Silly gets the zoomies at 12:35am and is, right now, freaking out under that sheet. You cannot tell. But he is.
The expression is everything with characters like these. A Halloween painting that is only scary feels one-note. I am reaching for the moment you look at it and feel something complicated. Delighted and a little unsettled. Warm and a little wild. Like the best October nights, where the air has an edge to it and you are very glad to be out in it.
I worked in gouache and India ink, on small pieces of paper that fit in the palm of your hand. The darks are jewel-toned. Think of velvet, old library walls, a sky that still has a little deep green left in it at 9pm.
They are meant to go up in October and stay up all year. That was the brief I gave myself. Spooky enough for the season, beautiful enough for the wall once November arrives.
The Right Frame
The part of this collection I am most proud of is the framing device. The Victorian oval. It elevates a subject and makes it feel like it was always meant to be seen. You take a small painted cat, put her in a portrait frame, and suddenly she has a name and a history and opinions about things. She has always existed. You have just been introduced.
I have been thinking a lot about the idea that the right container makes the thing more itself. A frame is just a frame, but the right frame changes what you see inside it. That is true in painting. I think it is true in a lot of other places too.
If the Season Calls to You
Spike, Edgar and the Happy Little Phantoms are all on eBay right now as original ACEOs. They arrive in a rigid mailer, with a certificate of authenticity, like a piece of October you can keep past November 1st.
If one of them is looking for you, they are there.
Therese Tucker is the artist and founder of Starthistle & Quartz, an illustration and surface pattern studio in the Pacific Northwest. Her work lives in the liminal spaces between the waking world and the dreaming one.
