Bats and Hats

I can't remember where I found this image. I wish I could wear this fabulous bat hat this coming Friday with my vintage black velvet cape!

Glorious freak parade

Thomas Woodruff's visions shimmer and glimmer and entice us to dream of darkness and whimsy. These images are taken from his book "Freak Parade", in which all the paintings hang together to create a long parade. This book is available at Last Gasp and will make a fine Halloween present.

Two-faced Paintings

A Cross-eyed Clergyman/The Loving Haft-wit Albino , 2007-2008
pastel on prepared paper




Inquisitive Infanta/Phobic Don , 2007-2008
pastel on prepared paper





Silent Screen Siren/Hag who Understands All , 2007-2008
pastel on prepared paper

The unbelievably talented Thomas Woodruff is showing this month some amazing two-faced paintings, that use visual trickery. As a child I was captivated looking at optical illusions and visual puzzles. I remember most fondly the strange vegetable faces by the Italien artist Arcimboldo or the steps that lead to nowhere by M.C. Escher.
I am glad that Thomas Woodruff is continuing this mind boggeling artistic tradition.

Mysterious etchings

These beautiful altered etchings are by Dan Hilier. You can also browse his sketch book on his web site, which I loved.

In the mood for dark fairy dresses

This Halloween I don't quite know what to dress up as. There isn't a specific character I want to be. It is more a mood I would love to portrait. These dresses definitely fit the bill. Something out of a dark fairy tale. Leave it to Alexander McQueen to come up again with gorgeous masterpieces. I fondly remember last years plaid and lace creations that had me in a swoon.

Happy Goth!

I always loved Goth, but Halloween is the perfect season to read this amusing and informative article by Cintra Wilson in the New York Times about the Goth Phenomena :

Perhaps one teenager too many lay awake after midnight, unable to get Edward Gorey’s disturbing Black Doll image out of his head. Maybe a girl with 14 piercings in each ear sang Siouxsie and the Banshees’s “Cities in Dust” to her cat enough times to warp the entire light spectrum.

But there was a distinct point in San Francisco, in the late 1980s, when all the postpunk wardrobes of my extended tribe — a lower Haight-Ashbury aggregate of motorcyclists, college dropouts, would-be artists and nightclub workers — turned as abruptly and completely black as if a wall of ink had crept up from the Pacific and saturated everything, save for occasional outcroppings of little silver skulls.

Secretly I nursed grandiose ideas that my funereal vintage attire aligned me with beatniks, existentialists, Zen Buddhists, French Situationists, 1930s movie stars and samurai. (In reality, my style could probably have been more aptly described as “Biker Madonna with mood disorder.”)

We were all young and poor: If your clothes were all black, everything matched and was vaguely elegant (especially if you squinted). Entropy was a thrifty, built-in style; if your tights ripped into cobwebs, that, too, was a look.

We lived in squalid tenements and worked until 4 a.m. Goth was a fashion response to doing infrequent laundry and never seeing the sun. A Northern California anti-tan could be an advantage if you made yourself even paler. On the bright side, our new monochromism was helpful to community building: We were able to recognize our neighbors as well as if we had all adopted regional folk costume. You knew you could rely on your blackly attired ilk to answer questions like, Hey, where should I go to get my 1978 Triumph Bonneville repaired/get green dreadlocks/get the word Golgotha tattooed in five-inch letters across my back/buy jimson weed/cast a reverse love spell for under $14/(insert your vaguely but harmlessly sinister demimonde activity here)?

“ ‘Gothic’ is an epithet with a strange history, evoking images of death, destruction, and decay,” the fashion historian Valerie Steele writes in “Gothic: Dark Glamour” (Yale University Press), a new coffee-table book, written with Jennifer Park. An exhibition of the same name, curated by Ms. Steele at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, unpacks the evolution of goth in fashion from its early beginnings in Victorian mourning to its most current expressions.

click text for the complete article.

New Halloween Classes

Want to do something creative? Are you bored with store-bought decorations? Come and join me at The Workshop, where I'll be teaching some Halloween themed classes this month.
Just visit The Workshop website to sign up.

Wickedly Whimsical Witches

with Elisabeth Alexander

This Halloween themed class is perfect for trying your

hand at collage with different papers, images and

stamps. Using your own face (or that of a family

member or friend*) you'll create some whimsical

witches. The paper doll is actually a card that can

be given to somebody or just placed on your mantel

as a Halloween decoration.

*We'll also have a selection of vintage faces to choose from

Sunday, October 19 1:00 - 4:00

$50/class fee + $10/materials fee

Stamp Art Series

with Elisabeth Alexander

Carve your own rubber stamps and print personalized edition note cards and other
stationery items. Learn tips and tricks to easily use and convert found images or draw your own.
We’ll also cover embellishments with different inks, glitter and embossing powders.

Sunday October 26 1:00 - 4:00 Halloween & Day of the Dead
Monday, November 3 6:00 - 9:00 Fall Table Settings
Tuesday, December 9 6:00 - 9:00 New Years Cards

$50/class (or $150/for all four classes) + $10/materials fee

The wonderful world of Cat's Clips

Check out this wonderful web site with beautiful clip art by a good friend of mine: cat's clips. Many images and animated gifs are for free! I love her use of real (and fake) animals and lovely colors. She creates all images from scratch by making these fascinating miniature set ups and combing them with her talent in computer graphics. She has spent many hours photographing the wild life around her house and neighborhood.