Week #37, Curious Creatures II

Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Surrealist Keyhole People), c. 1950 watercolor on paper, 12” x 9”.

Note: Our apologies for being a day late with our E-news this week. Between taking one show down, painting the gallery, putting another show up, and bracing for a storm, time got away from us. To everyone on the Gulf Coast: please be safe today!

This week we offer another interesting version of the Keyhole People, Dusti Bongé’s surrealist series featuring her whimsical characters. They almost always appear in pairs, or in small groups, although occasionally she chooses to present them in large numbers or as completely solitary figures. They are always in some kind of outdoor environment.

In this work we have three people, each with very distinctive “features,” in a lovely muted and warm palette. The central character is bipedal, tall, and attenuated, with a single small keyhole at the top of its elongated head. It also has a small appendage in a location about which we can use our own imagination. To its right is a much shorter creature with wide spread legs and a giant square head with a commensurately large keyhole. And finally, to the left of the central figure is a diminutive figure in the background with only one leg and an almost round head and ovoid keyhole. The tiny creature is yellow while the other two are a rusty rose color. They appear to belong together like a nuclear family, and look as if meandering on a semicircular path indicated in a white swath with black stipples.

Beyond the people there are a few other motifs, which Dusti often used in this series, that appear here. One is the funny cloud drifting through the large person’s head. Is it perhaps a fleeting thought, or a foreboding one, going through their mind? Then there is the earlier mentioned stippling, which often indicates some kind of sandy beach or similar ground underfoot. And a third visual motif is the very tight wavy repeating s-form snaking around the little creature’s singular leg. Its significance is rather enigmatic.

The piece is signed and dated in the lower right.