Just as a child’s relation to a beloved toy blurs reality and pretend, so also moves the creative activity and play of an artist in her studio. The painter Philip Guston once wrote; “In Rembrandt the plane of art is removed. It is not a painting, but a real person – a substitute, a golem.” With my portraits of Pinocchio, Ms. Oyl and Ms. Mouse, this quote was foremost in my mind. As these puppets “sat” for me in my studio, I wanted to lovingly create an image that represented them somewhere in between reality and unreality, static and animation, flatness and volume. Like the story of Pinocchio itself, the still life object, the artist and the painted picture plane endeavored to be real.
