No more than a few inches high, these tiny paintings by Indiana-based artist Mab Graves are very much in the spirit of the winter season. In the slightly off-putting style of Big Eyes’ Margaret Keane (Vol 34), her dolly-eyed misfits adventure through haunting wintery landscapes and county fairs. Inspired by fairytales and classic literature, along the way they make friends with characters like dachshunds and the Dish who ran away with the Spoon. They always seem to be fleeing- emancipated from the bleakness of reality into Graves’ dream world. At her blog, she writes, “People sometimes ask me ‘why don’t your girls smile? Are they sad about something?’. This often puzzles me… my little girls are not girls. To me they are Symbols of the innocence and fragility we have all had a connection to at one point or another.” Take a look at some of her most recent paintings below.
