In researching Dumas, elements of her method and process have really surprised me. While many critics refer to her works as “intimate” or “immediate,” for me, especially in tightly cropped portraits, I see the thin, watery material as a barrier on the surface, separating the subject from the viewer. She clearly expresses both emotion and feeling, but through a confused veil of strange colors and watery surface. In a similar vein, her actual process is fascinating. Dumas tends to work from photographs, rather than an actual person. To move from an image that precisely depicts a face, to a canvas or paper on which she improvises and confuses the specific features, is a surprising move. I’m also intrigued by this because of her focus on psychology (she studied both art and psychology in the Netherlands). Can one paint a psychological portrait from a photograph of the person? Does she not need to interact with and understand the individual?
Additionally, her work is rarely biographical, but she comes from an interesting background. She is a white woman from South Africa, she is a native Afrikaans speaker, but she has now lived and worked in Amsterdam since leaving South Africa. How does her background, and her relationship to it, continue to impact her work?
I love the questions you pose about various forms of veils present throughout Dumas’s work—both in the milky surface of the skin she paints, and in the decision to work from a photograph. I definitely agree with your point about this barrier of the watery surface separating the subject and the viewer. It seems Dumas reduces the face down to the bare minimum, giving us what we need—and nothing more—to sense a likeness through portraiture.