Santa Rosa artist makes whimsical Halloween art

In Dennis Haynes’s world, Halloween is spooky but not scary. The creatures he creates in his garage studio may be slightly sinister, but in a way that elicits smiles rather than screams.

He makes sculptures and ornaments and assemblages, typically of vegetable people and anthropomorphic pumpkins, that seem to have emerged from the patch to do mischief but mean no harm. Most of his gourds, reminiscent of Halloween decorations of long ago, sport toothy grins. Even the devil faces, in their devilish way, seem almost friendly.

Haynes loves the lighter side of Halloween, a world of witches out for a joyride on their broomsticks, black cats that won’t scratch and jack-o’-lanterns that will impishly light the way of trick or treaters from house to house in their quest for candy.

No one gets hurt and there is no blood or entrails — not even pumpkin innards — in his Happy Halloween World.

Haynes is one of a growing niche of artists who specialize in Halloween art. While some are inspired by the Gothic or macabre in a Victorian way, many, like Haynes, prefer the whimsical side of Halloween, that gives you permission to throw off inhibitions and for one night, be whoever you want to be.

“I’ve always loved Halloween. I’m not a Halloween crazy person. I don’t walk around in Halloween clothes all the time,” said Haynes. “But there’s just something so fun about Halloween You can dress up however you want. There’s really no rules.”

His creations, many of which evoke old fashioned candy buckets with the smiling faces of pumpkins — a look popular in the early part of the 20th century — are in the spirit of Halloween as he remembers it back in the 1970s outside Houston, Texas.

He remembers dressing up like a tiger or an astronaut. Halloween was fanciful and not the stuff of nightmares.

“It was definitely sweeter,” he recalls. ”It was a very innocent holiday to me. It was just fun. Horror hadn’t infiltrated … Halloween yet. Now you go into Spirit of Halloween stores and it’s machetes and masked weirdos. I don’t like horror movies. I have no interest in that part of Halloween.“

Haynes, for 20 years, has collected vintage Halloween decor. He has an impressive collection of fragile party hats made of orange tissue paper and stamped with black silhouettes of classic Halloween images. He also collects jack-o’-lantern candy buckets. Everything is neatly displayed in museum-quality glass cases in his studio or framed under glass and hung on the wall.

Haynes said Halloween did take a more sinister turn in the 1920s and 1930s, with ghoulish characters and goblins.

By the 1950s and 1960s, with the massive post-war baby boom of kids unleashed onto suburban streets, Halloween however, became tamer, until the slasher movies introduced a whole new level of gore into Fright Night starting in the 1980s.

Haynes works full-time for a large social service provider. Halloween art — he also does Christmas — is a serious hobby he does in his free time.

He usually starts preparing for the holidays in March and like a modern day Frankenstein in his home lab, creating his cast of creatures in time for Petaluma’s All Hallow’s Art Fest.

The September show is one of the largest Halloween-themed shows and draws collectors from all over the country who will pay, sometimes hundreds of dollars, for one-of-a-kind pieces.

The show is so popular Haynes’ stock is depleted by the time it closes. But he still has a series of foot-high, painted, clay sculptures of vegetable people, such as a toothy turnip lady with a handful of sunflowers and a cheerful beet man with potato body and carrot arms.

He also has many tiny candy bucket ornaments made out of pingpong balls, with waggish faces, and lit up from inside by little LED lights (that can be replaced).

Haynes hoards crafts materials wherever he can find them.

A visit to a farm where he saw oak trees dropping their white galls gave him the idea of harvesting them and turning them into little skulls.

“I called them the Sonoma Fairy Skulls,” he said of his creations, which he conceded are a little ‘ugly and gruesome.“ But he made up a story about how he found them in a little hollow in the hills above Sonoma.

Collectors snapped them up.

Anything can be fodder for a new creation.

“I just like to play around. Someone gave me a bag of antique ivory piano keys. People give me all kinds of weird stuff. They say, ‘Here, maybe you can use this.’ I have a million storage bins of stuff I may get to some day.”

He says he loses track of time when he’s at work in his little Frankenstein lab, where his imagination can runamuck, hence the name of his business, “Runamuck Studios.”

They’re just fun to play with,“ he says of his playful characters that sprang from the vegetable patch or some place beyond the veil. ”I make a bunch of different kinds. I just lose myself when I’m making them. Time disappears. I could work six or eight hours and go, ‘Why am I hungry?’ “

Haynes and his husband moved to their leafy neighborhood in southeast Santa Rosa recently from Seattle. They were sold on the street when their real estate agent told them it is a popular spot for trick or treaters. They were all in.

His passion for the aesthetic of Halloween carries into his home decor.

When they moved into the house it was painted in blinding shades of teal and fuchsia. Both men, not surprisingly, love the color orange and for them, it’s not just a color that comes out in October.

The first thing they did when they moved in was to paint the main living area downstairs with various shades of orange, from an orangish red in the living room, to a burned orange in the kitchen, which nicely offsets their collection of classic Italian Deruta pottery.

It doesn’t feel loud but earthy, cozy and comforting like sinking into a slice of pumpkin pie. Haynes even took great pains to find orange impatiens for his courtyard garden.

Haynes said he enjoys the happy side of Halloween, creating his cast of goofy characters who appear to make merry but nobody need fear them.

“While I occasionally make a character that’s angry or annoyed,” he said with a grin, “most of them are just content, happy characters that make people smile and makes them laugh. They make me laugh.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.