"Nightmares Of Halloween Past" By Gary Baseman

I recently grabbed a copy of artist Gary Baseman's new book, Nightmares of Halloween Past. And what an incredible book it is!

288 pages cataloging Baseman's extensive collection of vintage Halloween photography, which serves as the inspiration for many of his paintings also showcased...

All photos courtesy of Gary Baseman and Two Fauns.

Since the book has shown up at my door, I have spent quite a bit of time perusing its contents. So many wonderfully old, creepy, and nostalgic vintage Halloween photos alongside Baseman's now-iconic character style paintings. And the background stories give great insight into both the artist and his works.

I grabbed this book on a bit of a whim, but I am SO glad I did. It really straddles the line of being both an artist's book, and a nostalgic Halloween book. And if you're into either (or both, like me), I highly recommend adding it to your collection!

It is now sold out at Gary Baseman's site, but a few copies remain over at Two Fauns. Get on it!!

And if you're really into Baseman's Halloween-inspired art, he's currently offering a really cool, limited edition print of The Bad Luck 13 Monster Gang, a painting featured in the book. Available here.

Only 20 days until Halloween, monsters! I hope you're ready!!

  

The Salted Earth Series - Photos By Highbury Cemetery

Immediately after wrapping up the 2018 Halloween season, I sat down and went through the night's photos. 

In one last burst of creativity, I decided to take a handful and just see how far I could filter them and ended up creating a small art project. The one thing that I had noticed about the photos from Halloween night was the amount of color in each. It was something that I had started to worry about—that is, using too many colors in my display and giving it an almost Christmas light effect. EEK!

I took the photos and went in the completely opposite direction, stripping all color out of each, adding layers of decay and grit to accentuate the bare rawness of the subjects.

The results were pretty cool, but as the post-Halloween burnout quickly settled in late last year, I ended up shelving the project. I had the series of photos done, but I never did anything with them.

Until now.

In the run-up to this October, the Halloween fire is once again starting to stoke up, so I decided to revisit the photos and finally publish them all.

The term "salted earth" came to mind as a cool name for the series, but as I thought more about it the name took on more of a double-meaning.

In the literal sense, "salting the earth" was symbolic of spreading salt to wipe out an area of a conquered enemy, rendering the land useless for crop production. Similar to removing color and life, leaving only the harshness of raw black and white lifelessness.

It also came to represent the final season of Highbury Cemetery in its old location, leaving only waste as we moved to our new home earlier this year. The land, as I joked, was rendered useless for any future haunt display.

So this name stuck. And after nearly 11 months of sitting on the shelf, I finally present my 2018 photo project, The Salted Earth Series.

01. Rise of The Undead

02. Le Cadavre de Vodoun

03. The Guardian of the Tombs

04. The Obelisk's Watchman

05. The Spectre's Shriek

  

Pumpkins In The Cemetery

Back in November, I successfully completed my second annual Pumpkin Dump. That is, instead of simply throwing all of my jack-o-lanterns away after Halloween, I decided to do something a bit more creative with them.

I found a unique, visible location in my area to quickly and secretly set up all my jack-o-lanterns! My reasoning was twofold: first, it was a fun and innocent way to extend the Halloween season by a little bit and share it with everyone who discovered the set up, and two, after removing all wax and other contaminants, it provided a natural snack for the local deer, raccoon, chipmunk and squirrel population.

My second pumpkin dump was a great success, staying up at the front of a cemetery on a highly-traveled road for the better part of three weeks. Plenty of time to be seen by many, many people...

Fast forward to this week when I receive an email from a friend, showcasing his latest collection of photography. Amongst the collection of amazing rusty industrial photos and beautiful shots of local wildlife is a photo that caught me completely off-guard...

Photo courtesy of David Fitzgibbons.

Boom! There it was! A totally awesome photo of my last pumpkin dump! It was a bigger success than I had anticipated. I don't think he even knew the story behind this or who set it up (although he may have been able to guess)!

In my quick setup and getaway, I only snapped a couple of quick daytime photos before slipping away undetected. But he obviously had more time to capture the setup in a detailed way. The selective orange coloring only amplifies the utter coolness of this photo. It is, without a doubt, the best photo of my "work"...

I was so excited when I saw it, I immediately revealed the backstory and asked his permission to post it here, so thank you Dave! You have captured the eerie fun in a way that I couldn't, and provided a most unexpected surprise!

I see a freelance photography gig in your future, say next October? Amazing shot, sir!!

  

Highbury Cemetery on Instagram

I just wanted to take a second and point any new visitors in the direction of the Highbury Cemetery Instagram page! I've been hammering out the posts over there lately as an extension to my blog and as part of the Countdown to Halloween, so feel free to wander about and maybe throw a few hearts my way...

Lucius A. Fontenot - "Mémoire de la Boue - Mardi Gras"

Mémoire de la Boue - Mardi Gras

fr., trans., - The memory of the mud. Ancestral, genetic or inherited memory. 

Some traditions are so much a part of who we are they seem to not have been learned but inherited. The Courir de Mardi Gras and the boucherie bring us to a primal place. A place seeming distant from our immediate reality. A realm odd, fascinating, sometimes shocking, often time joyous. A realm where we are led by emotion, wonder and desire.

I absolutely love this series from Louisiana photographer, Lucius A. Fontenot. These photos take us to a traditional, rural cajun Mardi Gras celebration, one much different from the more familiar, glitzy New Orleans style. So much more authentic and stripped-down from any flashiness. The costuming is much more ragged and primal, lending itself to an almost uncertain and dangerous feel. 

If I ever make it back down to New Orleans, I would love to seek out this style of decadent celebration to experience firsthand...

 

All photos courtesy of Lucius A. Fontenot. More photos from this series (as well as other works) are at his site, with a nice interview on this series over at Vice.

  

Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits by Matthew Rolston

All photos courtesy of Matthew Rolston/vanitasproject.com

Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits is a new photographic series from artist Matthew Rolston that documents the incredible "mummies" from the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Sicily.

From his site:
MATTHEW ROLSTON’s latest photographic series, Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, is comprised of portraits of mummified human remains housed in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily, where the religious, aristocratic and affluent classes from the 16th through the early 20th centuries chose to display their dead, fully clothed, as a measure of societal and spiritual distinction, and in an effort to bring them closer to eternal salvation.

Absolutely stunning portraits of the many mummified inhabitants of the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo. Each bathed in a blue glow, the earthen-toned figures maintain a warm, yet still somewhat horrific highlighted contrast. The orange and brown hues of the preserved flesh retain a strange lifelike tone to the ghastly remains of each figure.

The Capuchin Catacombs have been on my bucket list ever since I had first discovered their existence years ago. I'm absolutely fascinated with the mummified figures and that even with their sometimes advanced stages of decay, are accepted and viewed as an historic religious site. Someday, I will make it to this site and take in all of its wonderful sights.

And as a haunter, I find the Capuchin Catacombs to be an immeasurable source for reference material. The real-life mummification is on view for all to see, and for people like myself to use as a vastly important source when creating corpses in my home haunt crypt.

For more photos and a wonderful slideshow video of more of Rolston's gorgeous photos of the Capuchin Catacombs, please visit his site at vanitasproject.com.

There is also a great in-depth interview with Rolston on this project over at Vice.

  

Markillie/St. Mary's Cemetery - Hudson, Ohio (Part Two)

Here it is, the final Cemetery Sundays post for 2017! In looking back, the month of October really flew by, even with how busy we have been throughout. The Cemetery Sundays segment has been a lot of fun this time around, and I still have a list of cemeteries left to visit in the Northeast Ohio area, so I look to continue it into the 2018 season.

But for now, we will continue our tour of the Markillie/St. Mary's Cemetery in Hudson, Ohio. If you haven't checked out part one of the tour, please do so here. I ended up going here as a second option, but was rewarded with some amazing photos of their older tombstones. I got so many photos, in fact, I had to split it into two segments.

So sit back for one last time this year, and enjoy the second half tour of Markillie/St. Mary's Cemetery...

As I made my back across the center of the grounds, I came upon this incredible array of four tombstones, aligned in a tight row. Were their coffins buried lengthwise?? Outside of the unusual alignment, each stone had a wonderfully ornate epitaph on both the front and the back of each stone! It really stood out in a cemetery already full of beautiful old stones...

Another new technique that I am going to try on one of my next tombstone props is going to be the cracked stone with discolored fragment. The stone on the right has such incredible streaking and staining on the top fragment, yet still has a rather clean and white bottom portion. Definitely a cool added detail to my cemetery display.

Another gorgeous crack in this stone! It looks like the top portion is ready to fall off...

Here is another cool idea that I hope to create in my cemetery display. At this point, I have nothing but individual stones and obelisks. I think I'll try to create a triple-stone family plot at some point...

And just like that, another season of Cemetery Sundays has come to a close. I had a lot of fun walking through these cemeteries this year, and really enjoyed photographing the old tombstones in each. Hopefully these photos can be used for some inspiration to make some cool tombstone props in another haunter's display. I know it will in mine!