Goblin Halloween Diorama- Part 1

As I blogged a week ago, I have started to develop the idea for my new Halloween diorama.  Some things going on at home had kept me pretty tied up, but I have finally begun to get the basis for the idea down on paper.  As I mentioned in the earlier post, once I started thinking about making the Halloween diorama, I came across a book Casting the Runes and other Ghost Stories.  They were English ghost stories set in the last century.  They were old fashioned stories of haunted places, creepy seen and unseen creatures, and objects with negative energies attached to them.  This reminded me of a poem read to me as a child, Little Orphant Annie.  Follow this link if you would like to read the poem.  http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/little_orphant_annie.html

The poem and the book of ghost stories reminded me of the superstitions about creatures that creep around in the night.  Those ideas became the basis for this diorama.  However, as I also mentioned in the earlier blog post, there is also a real history story that wants to be told here.  The history is not directly related to the diorama, but to the poem that was an inspiration for the diorama.  Further down in this blog post I will start the story behind the poem.  It is part of American history that is dropping out of sight.  And in some ways it is more scary than the ghost stories because it is true.  If you are interested read on.  (Here comes that history geek again!)  But first, I need to blog about the beginning of the diorama.

Many creative people agree that there is something intimidating about the beginning of a project.  Staring at a blank white page or a blank white canvas and trying to decide how to turn the idea into a tangible form seems to stop people in their tracks.  It feels as if you are paralyzed, ideas won't come, you can't bring yourself to make a mark on that pristine surface. The only way to get past it is to make a mark of some kind.  Once the paper is no longer pristine, the ideas begin to flow.  And that is where I have been for a week.  Finally I started putting marks on the piece of paper and the ideas are coming to the surface.

This week I started drawing in my sketch pad and finally started getting some ideas as to the look of the diorama.  They are just quick sketches, nothing fancy.  Out of those sketches the objects and their placement are starting to come about.  At the moment, I am just kicking around ideas, not everything I sketched will make it to the diorama.  However, by getting them on a page gives me more opportunity to see how the ideas relate to one another.  The story is just beginning to emerge. The photos posted above are from my sketchbook.

Now on to the history!  The poem, Little Orphant Annie, by James Whitcomb Riley inspired the cartoon character Little Orphan Annie.  The cartoon ran from 1924 to 2010.  Two films and a Broadway play were also based on this character.  That is recent history.  The real story is the actual events that inspired James Whitcomb Riley to write the poem.  That is a long story.  Today I will give you the basics.  Over the course of the making of the diorama I will share even more of this fascinating story.

This story is based on events that happened between 1853 and 1929.  Think of the many big events that were happening in American history during that time period:  The Civil War, World War I, typhoid epidemics, and the 1918 influenza epidemic just to name a few.  Also during this time, people were immigrating to America from all over the globe.  Many of the immigrants ended up in Eastern cities living impoverished lives in overcrowded tenements.  Birth control was nonexistent and families were large.  Women died young, worn out from bearing too many children.  War, disease, poverty, and death created orphans.  Lots and lots of orphans. 

It was estimated that there were 250,000 orphans during this time period.  Thirty thousand of them were known to be in New York City alone.  Children as young as four or five years old were roaming the streets homeless, abandoned and uncared for.  Other children had been pulled from their homes because of terrible abuse.  Some children had been given up to a churches because the parents could not afford to feed them.  A Catholic priest attempted to do something about the situation.  He raised money to begin finding homes for these children.  It was a noble idea.  However, for some, the road to hell was paved with good intentions.  The idea was developed that there were farmers in the Mid-west that had plenty of room and wide open space for taking in a child, so orphan children should be placed with them.  It was the beginning of developing the foster care system. 

Children from the age of four to eighteen were placed on trains that became known as orphan trains.  The orphan train would pull into town.  The children were paraded before the crowd on a platform.  The citizens picked the child they wanted and the train headed out for the next stop.  There was very limited supervision.  Some stories were success stories.  Other stories were the stuff or horror stories.  Many times these children were kept as slaves or indentured servants instead of family members.  And I'm guessing that the horror story was on both sides of the equation.  Even the best intentioned family could end up with a frightened angry orphan child or an angry teenager who had spent time living on the street or was put on the train by parents that could not afford to keep him or her. 

To read more about the orphan trains, follow this link:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan/

The poem Little Orphant Annie was a poem about an orphan child that had come to live with a family.  Although it does not specifically say in the poem that Annie came from the orphan train, other information on the poet has said that the orphan trains were the inspiration of this poem.  Annie symbolizes the children of European immigrants that had made up so many of the passengers on the Orphan trains.   The poem is tells about the superstitious beliefs of goblins and creatures that are of the folk lore from the old country.  At least this orphan seems to have integrated into the family well enough to be able to sit with them and tell stories in the evening. 

Well, I'd love to go on, but this post is getting way too long.  I'll blog more on this later.

I am also posting today's picture for the field project.  I am documenting the changes in the field near my home as it changes throughout the year.  I

t was cloudy and about 45 degrees Fahrenheit when the photo was taken about 8:40 this morning.  I was a little late.  I had slept in because an owl hooting had kept me awake for hours last night.