Monday, October 15, 2012

HALLOWEEN MASKS AND PORCH SCULPTURES


What a great Halloween decoration this would make! I picture it as a giant lawn sculpture made up of plastic bags of lawn clippings and leaves with a blanket tongue and paper eyes. Hmmmm....maybe it should it should be surrounded by kid furniture, as if it were situated in a living room like it is in the picture. Maybe a man's legs should stick out of its mouth. 


*Sigh!* The cheapest of all masks...the cereal box cutout type...and I see no current examples anywhere. Well, almost anywhere. John did those cardboard masks of Hanna and Barbera.

You don't think of Dada or Futurist architecture (above) when you think of Halloween, but Dada can be very theatrical and for me that earns it a place at the Halloween table. I could see a porch sculpture like this made of painted boxes, with Futurist ghosts coming out of the windows.

Good old Leg Avenue! This (above) is not only a good nurse costume, but it's a nice conversation starter on the subject of how hospital personnel should dress in the real world. We all know that men would recover faster if some of the nurses dressed like this.

I'll add that Leg Avenue still won't sell cardboard standups of their Halloween costume models. Anybody know why?


I might make something like this (above) for my front lawn. It depends how much the materials cost.


Above, a nice shot!


Boy, the mask (above) seems to expand out of the picture plane! 

This (above) is, believe it or not, an African mask. At first glance it looks like something that would have come out of America in the 1920s, but when you look close at the details you see lots of sculptural and painting conventions of African origin. Maybe the artist was influenced by old American cartoons he saw. Maybe he arrived at this caricature style independently. 



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Eddie- I'm sorry, but if nurses dressed like Leg Avenue I'd do anything but recover quickly just so I can stay in the hospital longer!

Brian O.

mike fontanelli said...

That second scan is of an actual comic strip character: "Powerful Katrinka," from Fontaine Fox's classic panel strip, TOONERVILLE FOLKS. The mask probably came from the back of a box of Kellogg's PEP from the 1930s. I have a very similar MOON MULLINS mask, painted by the same artist.

(BTW, regarding a later post: The best movie for vivid depictions of old London is, in my opinion, David Lean's OLIVER TWIST, 1948. It's also probably the best Dickens adaptation ever -- or at least the best one that doesn't feature W.C Fields.)

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Mike: A great film! All the David Lean Dickens films are worth seeing.