I’ve been up in my attic tinkering away on Promising Mad Woman, a series of paintings in progress — ten works in total, six completed, four underway — that examine fictional women on the brink of being labeled “mad.” These figures, faceless and stylized as paper dolls, inhabit the threshold between power and disposability, selfhood and spectacle.
I’ve been obsessed with painting these gals the last year. Each work starts with a highly intentional color field — a single, saturated background that acts as emotional atmosphere and formal anchor. Over this, I construct the doll figure using acrylic paint, layered textures, and select applications of stitched thread and textile-inspired motifs.
At the heart of this series is a question of acceptability. By painting these dolls at scale, in lush or acidic color fields, I’m reframing materials and imagery long associated with domesticity and so-called low craft. The paper doll, once a tool of gender training and fantasy, becomes an object of confrontation and inquiry. The figures are flattened, stylized.
I love when they look grotesque (no face, no jaw, etc.). The brushwork is assertive, and the heavy body paint surprisingly handles contradiction well: softness meets sharp edges, precision meets disruption, black outlines act as fence holding the doll back *and* a fortress she’s using to keep herself in tact.
I want each painting to feel like it’s holding something just under the surface. A tension that resists tidy conclusions.
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Color is a structuring force in Promising Mad Woman. The backgrounds are fields of pressure. Drawing on the visual language of pop art, I use vivid color to grab your attention and keep it there. These fields frame the dolls in heightened psychological space. They vibrate with emotional contradiction. Seductive but unresolved.
This use of color serves a dual purpose. It makes the work visually immediate while complicating its interpretability. Like the figures themselves, the color is too much in a way that has historically been gendered: Too loud, too bright to be serious. That, too, is the point. I want to place things which are easily dismissed — flowers, fashion, beauty, dolls, women, excessive color, quilting, craft — at the center of the canvas. And dare to take them seriously.
The paper doll format is both visual and conceptual. I first got into this idea when I saw these old paper doll books at my friend Sarah’s apartment. They were captivating, and I wanted to paint them immediately. Paper dolls reflect the historic treatment of women’s identities as interchangeable and ornamental, a dynamic reinforced through design, fashion, and domestic imagery. At the same time, I love design, fashion, domestic imagery. Being a girly girl is fucking cool. It can also be restrictive. The way paper dolls hold all that tension in one dimension is so interesting to me.
In Promising Mad Woman, the dolls refuse to perform. Their facelessness is a balance of loss and refusal of singular authorship, of easy empathy.
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Each painting is named for a character — fictional, literary, mythic — whose story flirts with the trope of the “madwoman.” Characters like Marguerite (Camille), Makarie (Wilhelm Meister’s Travels), Brandy (from the Looking Glass song you hear on every classic rock channel ad nauseam), and Callisto (Metamorphoses) all exemplify the cultural suspicion of women who deviate from expected roles. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar write in The Madwoman in the Attic, in their analysis of the Angel of the House, “to be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead.” I want to live my life in a way that redefines what selflessness looks like — on my terms. That’s what this work is helping me explore.
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The series will (fingers crossed!!!) be completed by the end of the year. My goal is for the ten paintings to be shown together as a single body of work. Their impact is cumulative. Seen individually, each doll suggests a narrative. Seen collectively, they become a haunting chorus of resistance and controlled chaos. The power is in their gathering.
This is a series about how the aesthetics of femininity and “women’s art” have been both celebrated and used to silence.
It is modern woman’s work to find your own interpretation among all that.
) As I made my list, I realized I didn’t have much to put on it. I’d done so much already. Even with a year spent doing nothing during a pandemic.
