Aspects of Alice by Phyllis Davidson

BLACK ALICE 

 48″ x 48″ – 2014. oil on canvas.  

" The Mad Hatter hard at work in his shop: purveyor of fine hats and garments, his concentration is so intense, he barely notices the disoriented Alice." 

MAD TEA PARTY REDUX 

48″ x 48″ – 2014 oil on canvas 

 “The great advantage of dinner parties is that it helps you to see your friends. If you want to see a man, offer him something to eat. The same rule with a mouse.”My version of that famous tea party includes the March Hare, the Hatter, Alice, and Alice’s Doppelgänger in the form of a crotchety young woman. “The rudeness was more than she could bear. She got up in disgust and walked off.”

 PIPE DREAMS

 42″ x 48″ – 2018 oil on canvas.

 “Pipe Dreams”, the final painting in this series, springs from Carroll’s “advice from a caterpillar” Here, the caterpillar, transformed into the archetypal image of a “Green Man” gives no concrete answers to the parallel Alices…or to us. But there are some paths and avenues he might lead us down – if only we knew how to listen." 

POOL OF TEARS

 48″ x 38″ – 2016 oil on canvas 

“I wish I hadn’t cried so much said Alice…..I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears”. That pool of tears became very crowded with the birds and animals that had fallen into it. The Dodo represents Lewis Carroll himself" 

 Other Aspects of Alice by Phyllis Davidson

"Since the twentieth century, the Tenniel and Disney canons became source material for metalanguage and intertextuality. With the advent of the digital age, the visual universe of Alice suffered a great impact and a renewal. Collages and manipulations, mixtures of photos, drawings, and digital paintings were some features that would guide new illustrators. But in a forest of symbols overpopulated by software, filters and image banks, in the lack of critical awareness and genuine imagination, collage can quickly deplete into a mechanical, impoverished, decorative uglification game. 

In my adventures as an Alice hunter I look for: Alices that destabilize the commonplace, the good taste and the well behaved; Alices that escape from linear paths and dive between the lines; Alices that challenge standards and formulas of representation; Alices that inhabit labyrinths, paradoxes and impossible geometries; Alices with metamorphic and mutant bodies challenging hybrid identities and eroticism; Alices that dive into bizarre nightmares and challenge the frontiers between mind, madness and the unconscious; Alices that journey through the world of dreams and the marvelous, plucking out the heart of her own mystery; Alices still able to surprise!" 

From: 
 Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation by Adriana Peliano