Think about your high school prom, if you went to it. Now picture it with an elephant, the Whore of Babylon and a small host of terrifyingly hollow-eyed angels. Less formal wear and more tutus. Better, right?
This year, Wendell artist Donna Horn is working on what will be the annual Misfit Prom parade’s first truck-drawn float. That’s a departure for a parade in which floats have been pulled by men dressed in leather horse costumes.
The parade is an offshoot of the prom, now in its seventh year. Horn dreamed the whole thing up, and it reflects her art and personality.
Horn’s art should be familiar to anyone who has visited the Wendell Country Store, where her paintings can usually be found on the walls. Horn herself can often be found there too, at work.
Her paintings follow two distinct streams. One is filled with solemn archetypal imagery blended and compiled from tarot cards, Hinduism, myth and various esoteric mysticisms.
On the other hand, there are strange, furry puppet-like monsters posing, bathing, and freaking out.
In both cases, the paintings are richly colored and populated with weird touches, whether of the foreboding or ridiculous.
In one, “The Mystery,” a pale, slightly griffin-ish, jackal-ish beast solemnly contemplates a pile of what might be entrails.
Who knows, it could be anything, Horn says, it’s a mystery. Another painting, currently on the easel in her studio — a purple yurt in the woods built by a cellist for acoustic reasons — depicts her in various stages of life atop a horse being led through a dark forest by a skeleton. The skeleton represents death, and the horse is balking. Hanging on the wall by the easel is a painting of a disheveled blue monster with a frantic expression, a paintbrush and another easel.
Outside, an 8-foot-tall space heffalump stands next to the garden tools in the shed, regarding any passing traffic on Farley Road with three eyeballs.
For any whose early life was bereft of Winnie the Pooh, the heffalump is an elephantine creature invented by author A.A. Milne. Discussed, but never seen in the books, the species is a subject of fear and conjecture for the protagonists. Horn’s is multicolored, has a short snout, three eyes, wears jewelry, hails from space and balances precariously on a gardening wagon.
Horn built the beast for the prom and has ridden it in the parade, both in its current incarnation and as an elephant.
Horn said she built the thing so she could cross something off her bucket list: riding an elephant down a main street.
The prom itself was another whim made reality, and it has grown to gigantic proportions.
Horn moved to Wendell years ago, after visiting the nearby stone chambers on Mount Mineral by the Shutesbury line and falling in love with the place.
“It’s kind of like the land of misfit toys,” she says. “ It’s a community full of really well-educated, smart, funny, interesting people.”
It’s the kind of place where the idea of a prom do-over, without the rules, could take off. A prom do-over was the original idea, but it has grown from there.
“One day I was just thinking, we’re a bunch of sort of farming hippies in the woods and I have this other half of me that really likes to make costumes and put on big tiaras — and I hated my prom,” Horn says.
Figuring others must share her disappointment, she started the prom.
It began as a dance and fundraiser for the Friends of Wendell, a sort of donation-funded communal insurance policy.
“People liked it, so the next year we gave it a theme, and then more people came, and everybody really liked it,” she said.
Space and “Promageddon” have been two of the themes. The latter is the source of the two sinister angel figures decorating her shed, a counterpoint to the much friendlier looking heffalump. That contrast mirrors the two main branches of her artwork.
Sitting in the Wendell Country Store under a row of paintings for sale — she said she’s never had enough for a show because they all sell off the wall there — Horn goes looking in her bag for her artist’s statement. She’s not much of a word person, she says. She comes up with a piece of paper.
“No, that’s a recipe for crumpets,” she says.
Then pay dirt; “I paint in two distinct styles, one style expresses the mystery, magic and complexity of being human in this inexplicable world. These paintings seek to take a mood, a moment, a particular moment or attitude and crystallize it into imagery that reveals its beauty with spiritual reverence,” she reads.
“That makes me sound wicked smart doesn’t it?” Horn says.
“The second style looks at our lives from the flip side,” she continues. “These works reveal ourselves as silly fallible monsters who take ourselves way too seriously. And we think that others cannot see our foibles, but they can and we can see theirs, too, but it’s all OK because we are cute and lovable.”
Prom began in 2009, the parade began in 2012, with the Promageddon theme, when Horn decided to stage the biblical Book of Revelation in a parade — with man-horses.
“Every year the parade has gotten bigger and bigger, and building floats is the big excitement now,” she says.
The prom takes place behind the Deja Brew pub, attached to the Wendell Country Store and post office at 57 Lockes Village Road. This year’s Misfit Prom will be held June 11.
Horn has relinquished direction of the event to a group of participants including SWAG, the new Wendell Artists’ Guild (the S doesn’t stand for anything).
SWAG sprang from the prom and parade, she says, and they’re hoping to start putting on some new things. She envisions creating a human-sized puppet theater in her side yard.
It’s time for something new, she says. Horn says the Misfit Prom has been going on for seven years and she usually like to move on from things after five years.
Wendell is an exception.
“It’s like a family, and I couldn’t imagine ever leaving,” she says. “I can be 100 percent myself — they all know I’m crazy already. Now when I leave town I don’t know what to do with strangers.”
Strangers and the strange are welcome at the prom.
And, Horn’s art will continue to be displayed in the Wendell Country Store, along with groceries and the smell of onions cooking for the pub next door.
For more about Horn and her artwork, visit her website at: donnahorn.wordpress.com
Photos and videos of past proms can be found on the Misfit Prom Facebook page.