Doll c. 1937

Jacob Gielens made this watercolour of a doll, but we don’t know exactly when. You can see the marks where the artist has been working to build form and pattern through layers of washes. The color is translucent, gauzy, almost like light filtered through fabric. Look at the way the paint pools and blooms, and how it stains the paper like dye. The effect is both delicate and oddly unsettling. The doll is carefully drawn, but there’s something stiff and unnatural about the pose and expression, a certain darkness to the eyes. Consider the detail around the hem of the skirt. The black horizontal bands that accentuate the ruffles, echo the dark beading around the neck. There’s a formal elegance here, a sense of craft and care, that reminds me of the art of Henry Darger. Like Darger, Gielens invites us to look closer, to see the world through an unusual and intensely personal lens.