I hadn’t intended to write anything today, but a painting popped up on my Twitter feed this morning that I found so compelling, that I wanted to quickly share some thoughts on it.
Halloween is a 2016 oil painting by the American realist painter Bo Bartlett. The most striking element of the painting is the subject, a child dressed as a ghost, staring at the viewer with a harrowing and hypnotic look in his eyes. This child’s costume is more ambiguous than the rest of the children’s. The billowing sheet and thick face paint obscures even their gender identity, creating a sense of total anonymity.
This anonymity is accentuated by the desolate background, in which a cloudless sky generates an oppressive amount of negative space. While we can definitively place the setting of Halloween to somewhere in rural America, its specific location is ambiguous. This scene could be taking place anywhere from the desert West to the Great Plains to the farmlands of the American Midwest and South.
What this sense of ambiguity and anonymity highlights is the function of costumes. The use of a costume obscures our identity. Paradoxically, this anonymity allows us to express who we truly are. A costume allows us to express our desires and vulnerabilities without fear of identification. This is most evident in the subject of the painting, whose chilling look of loneliness and isolation is highlighted by the thick face paint surrounding their eyes.
We can also get a sense of the identity and desires of the other children, who are dressed as distinct cultural archetypes, from religious symbols such as an angel and a demon; to folklore in the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood and the witch, whimsically stepping just out of frame. There is even a contemporary cultural archetype in the Wonder Woman.
In the digital era, this sense of anonymity extends beyond Halloween and masquerades. We all have a sense of anonymity in our social media lives. In addition to allowing us to share our vulnerabilities, anonymity has also allowed us to indulge in our worse impulses without fear. Consider the “incel” phenomenon. What began as online groups of young men commiserating over their shared fears and insecurities soon exploded into violent anti-women extremism.
Perhaps there is a reason we only wear costumes on Halloween, a day marked by fear and mischief.
You can find more of Bo Bartlett’s work at https://www.bobartlett.com/
The Scientific Ecstatic 