Let’s Carpal Diem This Halloween Season!
With three days till Halloween, we are looking at Charley Harper’s Wrented:
Charley Harper’s Wrented
In true Harper fashion, this piece takes a spooky image, a skull, and makes it light-hearted and funny! The title, Wrented, is a play-on-words because the birds that have taken up residence in this skull are wrens. Charley has managed to take the chilling idea of a human skull and make it seem nice and cozy as these birds make it their new home.
While this piece does not have terribly bright colors in it, Wrented remains true to real life. The ivory color of the bone with the browns of the wrens, and pieces of straw, make it seem realistic. This composition also utilizes unique brush-like strokes that provide an interesting texture and contrast to Harper’s typical strict, straight, and crisp geometric lines.
The image of skulls and skeletons are pretty quick to mind when thinking of the spooky Halloween season, but do you know why that is? One can look to two different traditions: Samhain and Dia de los Muertos!
Samhain is an ancient Celtic tradition that symbolized the end of the harvest season. This festival was often held around what is today October 31st, or as we know it “Halloween”. This day was thought to be when the veil between the realms of the living and the dead was at its thinnest, allowing for spirits to cross over from the other side. Thus spooky images of ghosts and skeletons represented the spirits who came back during the Samhain festival.
Colorful calaveras for Dia de los Muertos
Dia de los Muertos is a vibrant tradition throughout many Hispanic and Hispanic-Asian communities. While this day is not celebrated on Halloween, but rather November 1st-2nd, the images of skulls and death are very popular during both Dia de lost Muertos and Halloween. In fact, Dia de los Muertos has calaveras as important symbols during this holiday as a way to laugh in the face of death since this holiday is a celebration of lives once lived!
The skull is a common symbol for all things relating to Halloween, spirits, and death, all items in the vein of spooky season, thus making Wrented a great print to celebrate our third day before Halloween!
