SEPTEMBER 13 - OCTOBER 26, 2025

I’m not sure. I’m not exactly sure what my work means but I find excitement, magic and freedom in the uncertainty.  I’m not exactly sure, but I can tell you what I think it means.

Somewhere in my brain, personal narrative mixes with fairytales.  Historical events intertwine with the imagined and a veil of nostalgia blurs the border between fact and fiction.  Sacred imagery moves about in the temporal lobe with iconic characters from children’s stories and recent news flashes picked from the Internet join the legends of black and white television.  With colored pencils and paint, I try to make sense of these insistent and entangled images and render a tale of an individual trying to understand this world.   

The White Rabbit, Pinocchio, Jack Pumpkinhead and Humpty Dumpty are characters that appear most frequently in my head and in my drawings. Like many characters from fairytales and folklore, the passage of time has enshrined them as easily identifiable symbols, but the stories and characters are much deeper in meaning than one simple interpretation. Pinocchio with his elongated nose gives us the liar, but reclaimed from the soft brush of Disney, the richly layered text of Carlo Collodi’s The Story of a Puppet (Pinocchio), 1893, is a dark commentary on the extreme disparity of wealth in mid-19th century Italy and a rally cry for universal education.  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its marvelous illustrations have been studied by scholars since its release in 1900. L. Frank Baum and the original illustrator, W. W. Denslow, were political activists, so the story has been interpreted as an allegory for the political, economic and social climate of the United States in the 1890s.  Others have read the original story as the heroine’s journey. Go Dorothy! My favorite character from the sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz, 1904, Jack Pumpkinhead, can be recognized as the embodied figure of a creation story and the need to construct a God in our image.  Although Lewis Carroll denied any political or transcendent interpretations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, many scholars see direct references to the politicians and royal family of Victorian England.  John Tenniel’s iconic rendering of Humpty Dumpty and his brusque dialog in Through theLooking Glass---"Words mean exactly what I say they mean, no more, no less”---are mirrored in the language and temper of politics today.  Humpty Dumpty is a much more thought-provoking character when we know that in the original nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty was a mocking nickname for a large canon used in the English Civil War in 1648.  The fat cannon crumpled to shards as it fell off a castle wall. And the White Rabbit?  In his anxiety driven state he asks us to pursue, hold and value a sense of wonder in a time-centric modern world.  

My drawings, staged with these familiar actors, cultural icons, cartoon characters, mythical beasts, contemporary monsters and mysterious personae on botanical fields attempt to reconcile the past with the present, suggest a narrative and engage the viewer’s associative responses.  While keeping formal qualities of abstraction in mind, the drawings employ contrasting elements, precisely rendered passages with loose fluid textures, delicate shading with rough cartoon-like figures, and place polished areas alongside raw beginning sketch marks.  I would like my work to confront the viewer simultaneously with beauty and awkwardness and to mediate elegance with humor.

With everything said…I am sure that in the end, the work is a celebration of the act of drawing. – Patricia Bellan-Gillen

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