Background: Dolls

So anyway, when I was doing these paintings and making these dolls one thing I kept saying was that I didn’t want them to be too literal. I didn’t want the work to end up being an illustration of the story, that’s what illustration is for. I wanted the dolls to capture the essence of the character, something about their personality, and have them be a physical representation of their psyche somehow. Each character in the story is very important and each represents a part of Raskolnikov. When creating the characters for the paintings I took into consideration their relation to him and the effect they have on his psyche as well as their own characteristics. This determines their size and materials used to make them (I got the size thing from Max Beckman)

But something happened along the way. The last few lines I actually took from my Grad thesis statement, which felt more like a defense then a statement (some people really know how to suck the “fun” out of painting). And although I put in all this time and effort to come up with reasons for why I was doing what I was doing, when I started to make these creatures they kind of took on a life of their own. I was having a blast just ripping all these toys/dolls/action figures and putting them back together again with nails and wire and glue, burning/melting them, smashing them apart just to glue them back together again, once again tapping into my more twisted juvenile side, my best Dr. Frankenstein impression. The end result were these little monsters, it was like these toys had found their way into my subconscious, wandered around for a while and stumbled out that way, only to do my bidding as models.

So this is how they came about. I’ll go into them more later since I still employ this technique of making my models, and I’m spending way too much time on this background. I’ll probably repeat myself anyway, the department of redundancy department.



"Well, I’d rather stay here
With all the madmen
Then perish with the sadmen roaming free
And I’d rather play here
With all the madmen
For I’m quite convinced they’re all as sane as me"
-Bowie