Paperboy Series Artist's Statement
“The past is never dead. Itʼs not even past.” William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
I have stopped professing that I paint dolls because they are convenient, colorful, and stand very still while posing.
I really paint dolls for the same reasons that I played with them when I was young: they substitute for humans.
Baby dolls were never an interest of mine. They pretended to be babies, and I had no interest in pretending to be a mother. But dolls of children, and, even better, teenagers, and, best of all, adults, enchanted me. I used them to play-act, to rehearse growing up, and to imagine all of the wonderful (and not-quite-wonderful) events I might expect in my future life.
Like: Barbie trying on all of her outfits in her Dream House while Midge helps accessorize and consult about which is the perfect dress to wear on her date with G.I. Joe. I enacted it over and over and imagined that one day it would be me.
Or: Barbie and Midge sitting around the Dream House naked waiting for Ken to show up so that they could pretend they had just been caught stepping out of the shower. I didnʼt exactly know what would happen next, but when I was eight it seemed like the cleverest ruse imaginable, and at some point I did know that Barbie was supposed to be naked.
But there were also paper dolls, with clothes I, oh, so carefully, cut out with my rounded scissors, and trolls, whose ears could be pierced with ball-headed straight pins and whose little cave-man furs could be fashioned from colored pieces of felt.
Soup cans and boxes and game boards and art supplies doubled as furniture because I never had enough of the fancy cardboard kind. Small stuffed animals could be pets or people, depending on the momentʼs narrative. Sometimes my little sister was allowed to bring her Skipper and we might spend a frictionless afternoon trying to figure out what the dolls were supposed to do next.
Travel, friends, shopping, driving, dating, working, decorating Dream Houses, wearing very high heels with quite elegant ensembles - I was pretty sure these would be the biggest priorities of my adult life - but I always knew that I really didnʼt know.
I brooded about monsters and bad guys and something horrible named “escrow” that distressed my mother. I worried that when I got there my adult life would be frightening and incomprehensible. Unmanageable. Too big and too messy. In fact, werenʼt even my dollsʼ lives baffling and unfathomable? Werenʼt even they made up of mismatched elements thrown together without good aim or clear direction?
When was Barbie supposed to go to work? What was her job? When was G.I. Joe supposed to go to Vietnam? Could he come home for dinner? Why did they have nine hundred clothes hangers and no books? Why were their children trolls?
For me, the mysteries of childhood have simply become the mysteries of adulthood. I have no grown-up clarification, and no obvious, clear path. My life is full of inconsistencies, logistical fogs, and questions that other people simply donʼt seem to ask. So I continue to pretend that by playing with dolls and moving tiny furniture, answers may appear.
|
