Hallowieners
October 31, 2006While Mom and Dad were busy dishing out the mini-chocolate bars (”candy bars” to you Yanks) tonight, I went out for a walk around the neighbourhood to check out the jack o’ lanterns and the costumed kids on their rounds.
Well, shit. I’m certainly glad I’m not a kid nowadays because the number of participating homes has dwindled so drastically that you’d hafta be out for hours and walk for miles before you could ever get as many treats as we useta get just going around the block. Seemed like only one out of every half a dozen homes had the front porch light on and even fewer homes actually had any decorations up. I was out walking for about an hour on a dozen streets in this subdivision and counted perhaps thirty jack o’ lanterns. There were three homes that had really taken the holiday to heart and had set up some really great displays: front yard graves, scary sound fx, and skeletons dangling from the trees. Prolly 75% of the homes ’round here, though, were either dark or otherwise had no indication that there might be treats available if you knocked on the door. What LAME-Os!!
When I was trying to figure out what I wanted to use to illustrate this skinny post, I thought of one of my favourite artists: Mexican-born Utah sculptor Guillermo Colmenero. I absolutely love his Day of the Dead-themed work
and his booth was always my first destination each year I went to the Utah Arts Festival. He sculpts these beautiful and delicate, tiny and detailed colourfully-painted clay figures of skeletons
in all manner of activity–dancing, golfing, horseback riding… you name it.
His sense of whimsy appeals to me.
I have his sculpt of a gorgeous skeleton vaquero on his skeleton steed, and I treasure it.
So I looked him up on The Google (*cough*) to find some images of his work, and was dismayed to learn that he was being deported! It will be no uncertain loss to the local arts community in Salt Lake if this happens. To my friends down there, I hope you are willing and able to help. According to the Trib, local writer/filmmaker Terry Hurst and his wife, painter Ruby Chacon, are raising funds to help with Colmenero’s legal bills and a letter-writing campaign has begun. You can contact Chacon through her website.
There are Hallowieners everywhere, it seems. 
