Alien

As children do, Dumas took the liberty of basing this figure on a combination of elements from various sources: her imagination and memory, fragments of different persons from her past. The term “alien” also means foreigner or stranger, not a citizen or national of a specific country. The work has shades of the 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu and melancholy undertones reminiscent of Demon, a poem by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov, published posthumously in 1842 Dumas has virtually incorporated the figure into a deep blue sky, the color of the light that lingers till late on Dutch summer evenings.

Paintings tell stories.
As zombies walk the earth,
I moved slowly from 
the faces to the bodies.
From the eyes to the skin.
From the word to the flesh.
(MD 1989)