Halloween Windows 2013 Bloomsburg

Time once again for…(drum roll)…Bloomsburg Halloween Windows!

Every October local high school and middle school students decorate the windows of offices and stores in downtown Bloomsburg just for Halloween. It’s one of my favorite events during one of my favorite times of year. Call it whistling in the graveyard, if you like, but I love all this color and energy on a ghoulish theme!

The memento mori (reminder of death) has a long tradition in art. Probably the most famous is the optical illusion of a woman at her dressing table that turns into a skull if you look at it long enough. This modern take on the subject, ala tattoo art, is probably my favorite Halloween window this year. She even holds a looking glass. “All is vanity.” (If you’re in town, you can see her on the window of the Remit office on Main St.)

Tim Burton characters are recurring favorites. This year Frankenweenie joins the traditional Nightmare Before Christmas motif at the PNC bank. (Another Burtonesque scene without a painted background can be found at Chrysalis Salon, it even looks good with the dried floral arrangements behind it, but it didn't photograph well.

This beautiful Gothic Gargoyle (at Town Camera) is right around the corner from my house. I’ve always liked gargoyles. Remind me of home.

On the other hand, I have an ambiguous relationship with bats: I appreciate their ecological value, but find them creepy. They’re under threat in the northeast from “white nose” disease, so maybe that’s why none got into our house this year. And maybe that made me more amenable to paintings with bats in them.

Anyway, the bat population may be in decline, but they made a strong showing on the windows  this year, both in this orange whirling vortex (in the window of Steph’s Subs) and in the window of Fog and Flame, where a bat-girl doesn’t seem at all disturbed about getting one in her hair. 

Bats showed up in the background in a lot of paintings, too, like this haunted night scene on the door of Bloomsburg Diner.

I swear I’ve seen this smug cat before, and not just on the window of J. Lylo Jewelers. He kind of has a George Raft look to him. (Showing my age, now that's scary.)

Speaking of smug cats, I enjoyed this black kitten with a background of filigree text in the window of Exclusively Yours. The lacy letters are hard to make out but it reads, “When Witches Riding and Black Cats are Seen, the Moon Laughs and whispers, ‘tis Halloween.”

And if that's not cute enough for you...I couldn’t help but be charmed by this Baby Tiger Trick or Treater at the Capitol Restaurant and the window titled “Monster Bash,” at Balzano’s that looks like something out of a Maurice Sendak Tim Burton collaboration.

This pretty depiction of the wind blowing fall leaves at Van Dyke Goldsmith is an unusual theme, too.

Ok, it’s Halloween, and sometimes cute just has an edge to it. Check out this zombie toddler with an arm in her teeth and a yowling kitty cat grasped in her little green fist at Sneider’s Jewelry. 

The patchy green creature at Bloomin’ Bagels seems to be a near relation.And as long as we’re on a green-skin theme, I like this Frankenstein, too.Friendly, enough, but with a writhing red snake ascending his arm.

There are  windows in the “cute category” at Lauren-Nicole’s Salon on East St near Main, too, but the real grabber there is this skeletal clown;  the diagonal composition just makes it weirder. There’s another clown (of the demented variety) at Philip’s Emporium in Main Street.