For Sara Hanlon, who grew up in Roseville in the 1950s, Halloween was a time of fun and innocence.  

There were no Freddies or Jasons to terrorize the innocent. No “Pet Cemetery,” no “Saw,” no “Grudge” to keep one up at night.

Kids in Sara’s neighborhood fashioned their own ghost and witch costumes and trotted from house to house challenging their neighbors to figure out who they were, collecting homemade cookies and candies in the process. 

“We decorated our yards with scarecrows and carved pumpkins,” she said. “The most gruesome costumes were mummies, Bella Lugosi vampires and the Frankenstein monster.”

Those memories of a simpler time stuck with Hanlon through the years. So when her search for a Halloween gift for a relative turned up only the ultra cutesy or the ultra grisly, she decided to make her own. Today, she sells those prints at the Mill House Gallery, which she owns with her husband Mike, in downtown Chaska.

“In those images, I bring back the fun and whimsy of Halloween that I enjoyed in my youth,” she said.

In 2004, Hanlon came out with her first Halloween print entitled “Ghosts in Designer Sheets.” This year, she has issued her fifth print, “Hallowed Eve.”

“Of course I love Halloween,” said Hanlon. “It’s an all year thing.”

Hanlon composed each of her five designs in her head and then transferred it to watercolor paper using a combination of pen and ink, acrylic paint, watercolor and sometimes colored pencil.

She incorporates a number of Celtic symbols in her prints from apples – the ancient symbol of love- to Celtic crosses, along with a host of witches, pumpkins, bats and spiders. The recurring elements can be found in all of her pieces from “The Pumpkin Family” to “Cats in Costume” and “Wikkens and Friends” – her play on the witches from Macbeth.

Protest  

For Hanlon, the prints are more than just art.

“It is a form of protest,” she said, explaining that each year during the month of October she would get numerous people in the store lecturing her on the evils of Halloween.

Hanlon, a self-proclaimed research nut, has spent plenty of time studying the origins of Halloween and its many traditions. She looks at her prints as a way to “dispel misconceptions so many people have” – namely the idea that Halloween is evil or related to Satan.

She creates 13 prints each year – one artist original and 12 numbered copies. While 13 is largely thought of as an unlucky number in America, Hanlon uses it as a reference to a coven – an ancient gathering of 13 medicine women known as wiccens or witches.

It is just one of the many ways Hanlon provokes thought with her colorful pieces.

Among her five prints to date, Hanlon has yet to pick a favorite.

“I look at it as a whole project – a whole body of work,” she said.

It’s a project that consumes her most of the year.

“I start (the next one) as soon as (the current one) is completed,” she said.

It’s a tactic that helps her deal with those that have an opinion on her endorsement of Halloween as well.

“It can be fun when being given the lecture on “the evils of Halloween” to say “Next year’s Halloween image is already on the drawing board.”

-Mollee Francisco, staff writer

Find Hanlon’s Halloween prints at:

Mill House Gallery

516 N. Pine St.

For more information, go to www.millhousegallery.com or call (952) 556-8726

Prints range from $35-40