Halloween, Samhain and the National Gallery

November 1, 2017 4:02 pm Published by Julia Leave your thoughts

We cancelled Halloween in our house. Seriously. We got all dressed up, my son emptied almost two packets of fake blood in the kitchen. I screamed because he tried to get in the car with wet fake blood and the car has cream leather seats. Which I should never have bought as a family car. But I’m a feeler and I was feeling cream leather.

So I put his costume in a bin bag and began to drive to the party and somewhere along the line I snapped.

“You know what?” I said. “I just can’t do this.”

“That’s fine, mum” said my ten year old son. “Let’s go home and put the fire on and have tea.”

What a sweetheart.

It’s a funny thing, because every day we absorbe all these cultural messages and these things we should be doing. Every year I think this tendency just gets more and more insane. It’s like a compensatory mechanism for not having tribal elders, or a community of like minded people on tap, or parents willing to babysit living up the road. We exist in isolated pockets, and so instead we rush for the next fake blood purchase and instgram pic to prove we somehow still belong to the human race. And this year I couldn’t reach to it. (God only knows what I’ll make of Christmas.)

On the other hand we did do something extremely cool and decidely Halloweeny a few days previously. I had come across a facebook post by the London Drawing Group. Check them out! They were advertising an event which they run at the National Gallery called “Monsters, Witches and Beasts.” This event involved a morning’s art history tour around the some of the gallery’s most gruesome examples. Followed by an afternoon drawing class where we could joyously create monsters of our own. I decided to go and that my ten year old would love it. So we traipsed up to London and arrived with pads and pencils in hand.

“You should know there’s a lot of adult content in this talk” warned Luisa – the guide who met us and about ten other intrepid drawing students in the foyer.

“I’m cool with that” chirped up my ten year old. And I wasn’t about to take him home to Devon either.

Little did I know – what an incredible and vile human history we share. Luisa our guide was truly amazing – drawing on historical fact, myth an legend, etymology, symbol. She talked for two and a half hours about historical art and she was so damn good my son didn’t blink even for a moment. He came to London complaining that he hated art galleries. But not this time. Luisa had him riveted.

It was dark stuff for sure – Luisa covered infantcide, children-snatching dragons, harpies who came and swept poor souls up into the air and away with them, mermaids who lured men to their deaths, satanic half men half goat figures and centaurs who raped all the virgins at an Ancient Greek wedding. Blimey.

“Which was your favourite monster?” I asked my son before we started drawing.

“I think Medea” he replied, nonchalantly.

“The one who killed her sons?!” I gasped.

“Yes” he replied. “Pretty cool.”

GULP.

All in all I couldn’t recommend Luisa and her group enough. She told us that the London Drawing Group regularly receives 18k expressions of interest in each talk – and with only ten to fifteen places available you can imagine these get snapped up like hot cakes. All I can say is – make sure you like them on facebook and snap quickly. I will certainly be going back for more. And here’s some monsters we made earlier: