October 2023: Spooky Season

It’s Spooky Season! It’s taken me years to come around to the charm of this time of year, as I’ve never been one to do fear for fun.

I’ve been asking people why they like scary music and creepy fall vibes for years now and I think I’m finally coming to understand: everyone says it’s a way to feel out those scared feelings when you know deep down that you’re actually safe. And that’s exactly what I do with art.

Fear is our braking system. It pins our brushes to the drawer, screws the caps on to our paint too tight to break open. It glues our eyes to our phones. It’s a full body sensation of STOP.

Art, though, is a GO kind of thing. At its core it is having made or said something, and in whatever small way changed the whole world: this image, this object, this necklace of words strung together and placed right below the throat — these did not exist and now they do.

If we lived forever, we could work through our fear and then show up to the studio on the other side of these feelings, whole, and 538 years old. But our lives are not long enough to wait for the fear to un-spin its webs from all of our corners. The spooky is here to stay. The question is how to create art with the fear.