Miamia 1929

James Ensor made "Miamia" with colored pencil, imagining the figure in its totality on the page. Look at the tentative, searching lines conjuring up the form! I feel like Ensor is right there, trying to bring this figure into being, deciding what to include and leave out. The color is so light and the drawing so free it is as if he’s seeing what emerges, a figure materializing out of a dream. The pinks and yellows create a sense of warmth, but there’s an edge of something… unsettling. Is that a doll she’s holding? It has the same coloring as the figure, which gives the composition a sense of symmetry but also of doubling or mirroring. It makes me think about the way so many artists are involved in a kind of conversation with the uncanny and unseen.