By MARK NARDONE
Big Shout Magazine, October 1993

Philadelphia/Wilmington artist Tom Watkins has always loved Halloween, and it shows in everything from the metaphors he uses to describe the local art scene to his holiday preparations.

“It’s my favorite holiday,” Watkins says. “It may have been a big deal in my house because my father — who died when I was 11 — his birthday was on October 30th, so Mom always did something Halloweeny on Dad’s birthday.

“I guess I was a typical ’50s kid,” he says. “I came in right at the beginning of the revival of all the Universal horror films on TV, like the Shock Theater package with Frankenstein and others like that. Eight or nine famous monsters came out. There were little guys in rubber suits smashing up little cities and that kind of stuff — stuff young kids, especially young guys, are really interested in.”

Watkins’ early fascination with monsters led to an interest in costuming. He’d melt plastic bags to form masks of aliens, then, too old to trick or treat, run amok among neighborhood children. “I basically terrorized the park,” he laughs.

In the late ’60s, Watkins began creating costumes based on comic book characters such as Gilbert Sheldon’s Wonder Warthog, a pig dressed as Superman. He also discovered the Halloween parade in Rutland, VT, which was quickly becoming a favorite for members of a new wave of comic writers and artists in the early ’70s.

Watkins’ parade costumes began to attract much attention, and he was invited to comic book shows and conventions in New York City. Success there led to special effects work for Baltimore filmmaker John Waters of “Hairspray” fame, and eventually to a costume business in Wilmington.

The business didn’t last long. There was money to be made in Halloween, but after covering overhead, there were peanuts left for the purse. “It turned into a real nightmare,” Watkins says. “It was a lot of fun, but you couldn’t make any money doing it.”

Halloween imagery fills his commentary about Brandywine Valley arts and artists, a somewhat bland culture Watkins believes centers around the Wyeth family, its admirers, and nostalgia.

“It’s a real safe, corporate kind of thing to hang a picture of the old mill in the office,” after destroying area farms to make way for strip malls and subdivisions, Watkins says.

“I think it’s a combination of trying to salve their guilt and really liking the old mill — but it was in the way. I’m sure Dr. Mengele liked to entertain the little kids before he did those horrible experiments on them. He probably thought the kids were nice, but said, ‘Hey I have to go to work,” put on some rubber gloves, then vivisected some little kids somewhere.”

Beyond Brandywine art, Watkins says, “It’s real tough figuring out Wilmington.” There are a few young artists — ironically, perhaps, influenced by the Wyeth school — who have astounded him, but most have fallen through the cracks, he says. Others are too “splashy-poppy-TV-video-album-cover,” even though it’s natural for young artists to document the activities of their peer groups.

The art he enjoys most is the work of untutored “Sunday painters,” whose mistakes make their pieces interesting. “Nobody’s ever told them, ‘You can’t do that.'”

“I used to think painting was dead,” says Watkins. “I look at it a little bit differently now. I think some of the function of painting is dead… The camera has eliminated a lot of that function, and it’s really taken a long time for the art establishment to really own up to that. The Mona Lisa now would be somebody’s home video.”

So painting, still in a state of transition, isn’t dead yet, even if it hasn’t found its niche in the art world. “I think that, I, or any other artist, physically making something the best they can, with some of their personality and feelings in it, is art, even if it’s not a painting on a wall,” Watkins says.

He parts with two pieces of advice for budding artists: “Don’t quit your day job. Making art is very expensive.” And lest one ends up doing pastels of little kids at the mall, “Get a life. Get a style. You’ve got to go out and do something. You can have a great technical ability, but it’s worthless if you don’t have something to say.”