Chapter I · Halloween · 51 days
Spooky enough to remember. Safe enough to frame.
Thirty ways to be scared and delighted at once.
Your kids as a sheet ghost and a cardboard knight on the porch. Your grandmother in a Victorian paper theatre. The dog leading the costume parade down Main Street. Pick the Cute Side for the picture book or the Dark Side for the ghost story, and nothing on either shelf would frighten a child.
The Cute Side
19 traditions
1920s Die-Cut Party Decoration
The flat orange-and-black paper decorations of a 1920s parlour party.
Black-Cat Folk Art
Naive New England folk painting — arched cats, a fat moon, a crooked fence.
Candy-Corn Pop
Screen-printed pop art in candy-corn stripes — sweet, loud, kind.
Jack-o'-Lantern Realism
Cosy October night — a porch of carved pumpkins, one warm glow.
Trick-or-Treat Illustration
Golden-age children's-book illustration — lanterns, leaves, a bag of sweets.
Witch's Cottage Gouache
A snug, moss-roofed cottage of potions and candles — cosy, not creepy.
Porch-Light Family Portrait
A 1950s magazine cover on Halloween night — costumes, the porch lamp, the bowl held out.
Pumpkin-Patch Afternoon
Golden October light, a field of pumpkins, hay wagons — painted the American Impressionist way.
Victorian Paper Theatre
A toy-theatre stage of cut paper — the subject on the boards, a cardboard moon above.
Harvest-Party Genre Scene
A nineteenth-century genre painting — the barn party, the apple tub, lantern light on every face.
Black-Cat Costume Parade
A children's-book parade — everyone in costume, marching down Main Street with a black cat leading.
Harvest-Moon Cornfield
Regionalist oil — a full harvest moon over corn shocks, a scarecrow, the subject in the lane.
Scherenschnitte Silhouette
German-American paper-cutting — one sheet of black paper, cut into the subject and a Halloween border.
Cider-Mill Watercolour
A New England cider mill in October — transparent watercolour, apples in crates, steam from the press.
LED Porch Realism
Halloween as it actually looks now — LED string lights, an inflatable on the lawn, a minivan in the drive.
Graphic-Novel Ink
Heavy modern ink, halftone shadow, one spot colour — a page from a contemporary graphic novel.
Cut-Paper Diorama
Layered paper cut by hand and lit from the side — a contemporary craft diorama.
Feature-Animation Still
A frame from a modern animated feature — clean line, lit volumes, autumn palette.
Two-Colour Riso
Fluorescent orange and black on newsprint — a modern risograph gig-poster print.
The Dark Side
11 traditions
Crosshatched Storybook Macabre
Pen-and-ink Edwardian gloom with a dry wit — the gothic nursery.
1930s Monster-Movie Lobby Card
Hand-tinted studio horror poster — fog, castle, lightning, one dramatic face.
Victorian Spirit Photograph
A sepia cabinet card with a faint translucent visitor in the background.
Sleepy Hollow Nocturne
Hudson River School moonlight — covered bridge, mist, a headless silhouette far off.
1950s Horror-Comic Cover
Four-colour pulp cover — ben-day dots, a screaming green sky, a wink.
Haunted-House Matte Painting
Cinematic matte-painted mansion on a hill — every window lit, one storm.
Ghost-Story Tintype
A wet-plate tintype at dusk — silver and sepia, a lantern, a grave sense of occasion, not fear.
Gaslamp Fog Nocturne
A Whistler-style nocturne — fog, one gaslamp, the subject a warm figure in a blue-grey night.
Hollow-Tree Storybook
A Rackham-style storybook plate — gnarled trees with faces, owls, the subject brave in the lantern glow.
Masquerade Ballroom
A candlelit masquerade in an old mansion — velvet, gilt, half-masks held on sticks, a chandelier.
Neon Street Nocturne
A wet city street after dark — neon signage, sodium light, long reflections.
The one rule
The face stays. Everything else is repainted.
We are a family of artists, and the holiday art we kept being sent was one look with the colours swapped: orange in October, red in December. That is a costume, not a tradition. So each room here has its own painters behind it — Currier & Ives and Nast, the Brandywine and Hudson River schools, Rackham, Whistler, Bruegel in the snow and the magazine covers of the 1940s — and none of the four would recognise the others.
What we keep is you. The faces, the coats, the dog and the front of your house are held exactly as you sent them, and a judge scores every painting for likeness before you see it. We paint children here, and only here: a parent or guardian signs for every photograph with a child in it, the darker Halloween shelf is closed to them, and every painting with a child is looked at twice before it is shown and once more, by a person, before it is printed.
Most of the AI work doesn’t resonate with us either. We spent months on these rooms so that at least one of them resonates with you.