Remembering, 1966

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Faces and figures with softly rounded, childlike features seem to float in the dark blue surface of the night sky in Julia Thecla's mysterious painting Remembering. Pigeons roost in a tree's slender bare branches, through which appears a moon-like orb. The artist lapped the opaque dark blue of the background over blended and layered pastel hues, creating forms that are at once ghostlike and crisply defined, confusing the spatial relationships between objects and background. The scene evokes the unreality of the dreams of sleep and of daytime reveries. Perhaps these imaginings emerge from the two linked heads near the center of the composition—one with eyes closed and the other awake, like two states embodied in a single individual. Remembering suggests the nature of recollections from distant childhood, which assume the strangeness and illogic of dreams due to time's eroding effects and also to the disconnect between a child's and an adult's perception of the world.

A native of rural Delavan, Illinois, who arrived in Chicago to study at the Art Institute, Thecla found a sympathetic environment for her highly individual work within the city's progressive art circles of the 1930s. An independent spirit during a time of many barriers for women artists, the diminutive Thecla cultivated an eccentric childlike persona that complemented her art. Little girls, ballet dancers, bunnies, birds, and llamas recur in her intimately scaled fantasy paintings. She typically worked in water-based translucent and opaque paints applied to artist's board, manipulating her materials in innovative ways, as in Remembering. Thecla's cryptic and suggestive images offer glimpses into an alternate reality of dreams, fairy tales, and magical or extraterrestrial worlds.