The Doll (Maquette for The Doll's Games) 1938

Hans Bellmer made this photograph of a doll, sometime in the mid-twentieth century. The doll is fragmented and fleshy; the body has been constructed and reconstructed. Making a painting, you often start with an idea, but you have to be open to the painting itself, to the way the colors mix, the lines move, and how the image wants to come into being. I imagine Bellmer felt like that with this doll - it must have taken him a while to find all these different body parts. It is quite something, this erotic fragmentation - and it is all so physical. The doll reminds me of Louise Bourgeois, a sculptor who also worked with the body, but her work is more about trauma, memory, and the unconscious. Bellmer, I suspect, was more into Freud, eroticism, and the uncanny. Artists are often in conversation with each other, even across generations. It's an ongoing exchange of ideas and techniques, each one building on the work of those who came before.