Column 12 – Inspirational Halloween

(Belated posting, I know. I tend to wait to post these until RKYV is released, and this one came out late.)

Column 12 – Inspirational Halloween

Here’s to keep my miraculous appearance a second time running short and fairly sweet. Hm, sweet? Like, treat sweet? Trick ‘r Treat?

By the time you all read this, I’m sure it will be long past Halloween. (Sorry, Randy, but it’s true.) Still, I think my leading topic can be appreciated year round, especially when the sun goes down and the chill in the houses begins to increase.

Ghosts.

I’m willing to bet every reader has a single defining thing they gravitate towards when they hear that word. Some people probably think of the sheet-like ghost that’s a white see through mass. Others might think of a person, a relative or historic figure known to haunt a location nearby. Still others may go the extra length to think of malicious forces we cannot explain.

The thing is, we don’t know that much about ghosts. In fact, at least in the U.S., the majority cannot agree on whether they exist or not. (I know spiritually differs between cultures. Stay with me.)

But ghosts are pretty darn popular, at least in the U.S. I even went and wrote a story about ghost walks in Pittsburgh for the Pitt News. The newspaper wanted their share of ghosts, too.

Two things made my personal experience all the more worthy. One, our stories are often rooted in historical fact. Two, the man telling the ghost stories was a marvelous professional freelance story teller. Raconteur, was he? Oh yes, he was. He knew how to tell, what to include, what was entertaining, and in the end, how to build the story and keep it flowing right up until the end without letting the audience escape the hook and net he’d made just for them.

See the point yet? Whether these stories were true or not, whether the listeners believed or not: story telling itself is an act of creation. Another person would certainly have shared the tales in a different style and made them a bit different with their own style. It’s the nature of tales to be adopted and changed. Fairy tales are all said to originate from three basic stories that were elaborated on and changed for the cultures and times they existed in. I don’t even want to try to count how many exist now.

Not only that, but creation serves not only a personal desire, but a public desire. I could tell my tour guide wanted to share his stories, and I could tell the audience wanted to be there – or at least managed to enjoy themselves if they were dragged along. It happens.

It’s important to remember when working on artwork, you truly can’t please everyone, but on the other hand: maybe it’s not always the best idea to always create what you specifically want. There has to be at least a sliver of public desire for the artwork to be shared artwork. If you are happy keeping it to yourself as a hobby, by all means: go for it. But if you want to go public at some point, you can try to tone down your own artwork for the public, at least for a time. Maybe you can release a special edition later once you have fans?

This topic of ghosts may be as debated as the idea of being yourself versus selling to the public, and I am sure we all will take on other topics of questionable nature (what is more fun for an artist?) but I think peaceful debate is half the fun.

In the end, the best artist makes the art as believable as my ghost tour guide did – at least for a time. But preferably, permanently. (Which was the case with the walk. Congrats, good sir.)

To read the article I wrote for the Pitt News, go to http://trolleygirl13.blogspot.com/2009/10/pittsburgh-ghost-walks.html .

Best, and Happy Halloween,
-Larissa