Wax Doll c. 1936

Mary E. Humes made this wonderful watercolour, Wax Doll, sometime in her lifetime. I love the muted palette, mostly greys, creams and browns, as if everything has been toned down, seen through a soft filter. I can imagine her, holding a thin brush and letting the image of the doll emerge from the paper, bit by bit. Her gaze is quite unnerving. Those blue eyes are so direct, so knowing, they almost seem to follow you. The dress is beautifully rendered with its soft draping and folds, and it’s so ghostly and still. There's a naive quality to the drawing, an innocence perhaps, but there's something else there too. Maybe it’s a nod to the hidden depths within the doll – a sense of the uncanny and repressed? The painting’s in dialogue with other representations of dolls in art, like Hans Bellmer’s unsettling doll sculptures, or the eerie photographs of dolls by Laurie Simmons. It reminds us that artists are always in conversation with each other, echoing and responding across time.