I’ve been brought up with several influences in my life that affect me, my creations and my world view, but none quite so fun, frightening, endearing and ever-reaching as horror films.
One of those films is Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Love this movie. There is a scene in the film where one of the main characters has come into the police station and found everyone dead. The cop that, well, wasn’t a nice guy, is now in the lap of a giant killer clown and is now basically a puppet, or ventriloquist doll.
I am one of the – apparently – many people who suffer from coulrophobia. It’s real, not affected, not something to get a boy’s attention. My husband insists it’s because my father let us watch IT when it came out, but I don’t know. I was 7, but I was a smart, ‘totally-not-real-just-a-movie’ 7.
This fear… It’s not just creepy clowns, or clowns where there shouldn’t be clowns. It’s clowns in general. I hate and fear them. Even seeing a regular clown gives me goosebumps and my heart starts pounding.
And yet I managed to create something with a clown in it late 2011:
“Killer Klown and Mooney Puppet” by Rebecca Galardo – 9-17-2011
I can tell you drawing the original version of my picture and then doing this in watercolor was a real, honest struggle. Drawing Mooney (played by the oh-so-double-secret-probation-freaking-awesome John Vernon) and painting him wasn’t difficult. But the clown… I struggled because I didn’t like looking at him. It’s funny. You can see in my heavier hand on the clown. I was rushing. The painting maybe took 30 minutes and it’s just a fun little thing in a sketchbook, but I was intentionally pushing myself with the work.
My goal now though is to draw something that terrifies me again. With more detail. If good writers write about what scares them, I think a good artist can draw what scares him/her. What do you think?
Rebecca Galardo Art 