Marlene Dumas interests me as an artist because of the peculiarity of her work.  It is strange, eerie, and often discomfiting.

I have always been attracted to portraiture and I think that Dumas’s portraits are exciting because of how different they are.  Her water images are haunting and powerful, and her clear interest in depicting emotion and individuality through these images is enticing.  She gives each person their own space on the paper, but then, in this recent exhibition, she then crowds all the faces together in a grid-like pattern, each person become one of many.  I find this shift interesting in relation to the history of portraiture, where it is often used to celebrate or glorify a single person. Here, in the work of Dumas, each individual just becomes lost in the crowd.  I’m interested in her use of materials, her application of paint, and her approach to portraiture and the body.  I found a quote on her website that I am eager to delve into and unpack.  She said that ”no painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of—the pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it’s not.”