For some people, there really is no other holiday than Halloween – people like Victoria Regina. The Denver artist is known for her avant-garde paper dolls, homemade greeting cards and Frida Kahlo sidewalk-chalk portrait created during last month’s El Grito festival on Santa Fe Drive.
What fans of Regina’s do-it-yourself industrial creations may not know is that this Colorado native and architecture intern is a Halloween extremist. Each year she toils over handmade costumes and cooks up an elaborate costume/birthday party that has included an enormous disco ball fashioned out of skeleton faces and a 5-foot spider-web chandelier. Regina is such a Halloween fiend she is considering going into business as a Halloween designer. “It’s a weird profession where you have to be a Renaissance person.”
That she is.
Among friends, the costume concept the artist is best known for is her handmade Halloween horns, the perfect do-it-yourself solution for crafty types scrambling for last-minute costume ideas.
“The longer horns are the most fun. They’re the ones you can do in big crazy spirals like African antelopes,” Regina said last week before leading a small group through a two-hour Halloween Horns class at the offbeat, artist-run Santa Fe Drive gallery Capsule.
Regina made her first pair of horns three years ago when she wanted to dress up as the Monty Python wizard character Tim. “He’s kind of got a bomber hat with ram’s horns.” Since then, Regina has hatched more than a dozen pairs of painted foam horns ranging in size and
style from tiny, red crescents to big, imposing horns tailored after the ones actor Tim Curry donned as the Lord of Darkness in the 1985 Ridley Scott film “Legend.”
Ivvanee Martinez and Brandon Borchert showed up to Regina’s Halloween Horns class with their dogs, Hank and Uma. Using the supplies Regina gathered for the class, all of which can be found at hardware stores or craft shops, the couple worked on two pairs of stubby little horns they planned to use as part of the dogs’ Halloween costumes.
“They’re going to be Satan’s little helpers,” Borchert said of his Whippet and Italian Greyhound. One of the dogs already was wearing a green-and-orange velour jack-o’-lantern collar that matched Martinez’s orange pumpkin socks paired with forest green Crocs.
“There are several ways to make horns,” Regina told the half-dozen students seated around an industrial table in the studio space behind Capsule, where each wall is painted a different color and the air is thick with the smell of plaster and wet paint. “This is the simplest technique I’ve found.”
Denver musician Rick Benjamin arrived at this grown-up arts-and-crafts hour with bleary eyes after a long day of work. Benjamin decided to tackle one homemade horn instead of two, and perked up almost immediately after he spotted a pair of Regina’s completed horns sitting on the table. The stress of the workday seemed to slip away as the trombonist with the Perry Weissman 3 began to create a thick, twisty unicorn-looking horn.
“It’s the horn of plenty,” Benjamin said with satisfaction as popcorn pieces of foam piled up on his shirt and around his feet. Not that he minded.
“This is thoroughly satisfying,” he said while shaping his foam horn. “Sort of like slicing open a fish.”
As wives will do, Capsule proprietor (and Benjamin’s spouse) Lauri Lynnxe Murphy chimed in: “Only without all the guts hanging out.”
Regina’s process takes about three hours, but the bulk of that time is needed to allow a layer of acrylic painter’s caulk – it’s lathered over the foam – to dry. This makes the forms look more solid, and the final coat of paint look more vivid.
Kim Emmanuel wanted her horns to look just like the ones Regina wore while leading the workshop. “They’re my sexy devil horns,” Emmanuel said while wearing the instructor’s original Wizard Tim skullcap, just for fun.
Whether it’s jewelry or clothing or elaborate headdresses, almost all of Regina’s creations are rooted in the artist’s knack for looking at an object, deconstructing it and then figuring out how to build it in reverse. Her “altered-art” ideas have been getting so much attention lately that Regina is compiling a book of original projects and ideas that she’s tentatively calling “D.I.Y. Subculture Style.”
If Halloween horns aren’t your speed, check out these other $25 do-it-yourself classes at Capsule, 554 Santa Fe Drive: “Weaving Trash Into Treasure” on Nov. 2; “Meet Your Imaginary Friend” on Nov. 9; “Stretching & Preparing Canvases and Frames” Nov. 16; “Make Your Own Holiday Cards” on Nov. 30; and “Treasure Boxes” on Dec. 7.
For information, call the gallery at 303-623-3460.
Staff writer Elana Ashanti Jefferson can be reached at 303-820-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com.
