The Gothic Sweetness of “Baby Talk”

It’s easy to assume that dolls, by their very nature, are vessels of comfort—ciphers for childhood, safety, and softness. Or super-creepy monsters, like Chucky. But in my Baby Talk series of paintings, I wanted to ask a more complicated question: what happens when those emblems of tenderness or terror are dropped into a different atmosphere? When the Gothic vibe whispers noir instead of nursery or graveyard?

I used watercolors and photography to render these dolls in quiet, frozen moments—scenes that feel at once intimate and theatrical. They don’t reenact the plots of classic films like It Came from the Black Lagoon or I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, but instead borrow their emotional weather: unease, isolation, the longing that hangs in alleyways and shadowy doorways. The noir titles act like captions overheard through a cracked window—fragments of another story running parallel to the one you’re seeing.

The Gothic Gaze: Softness Touched by Decay

Though the dolls may look serene or drowsy at first glance, their surroundings tell a different story. There's a worn stillness to many of the backgrounds—subtle clues of a world that’s not pristine. A chair becomes a stage; a crib becomes a prison. The tension lies in that juxtaposition: the gentle tilt of a doll’s head against an atmosphere laced with quiet dread.

This is the realm of the Gothic—not the campy version, but the emotional architecture of it. The suggestion that beauty is never quite free from decay, that innocence lives beside grief. In this series, childhood isn’t erased, but it is made strange. There’s a spectral quality to the colors, too: blush pinks that feel almost translucent, pale blues like the sky before a storm, always edged in shadow.

Noir Underneath the Lace

If the Gothic provides the emotional backdrop, film noir lends the framing. These pieces lean into that noir impulse: to search, to expose, to linger in the liminal. The dolls become both protagonists and witnesses—staring out, turned inward, or slumped. There's an eerie stillness, but not because they’re “haunted.” If you stare awhile, they seem to be remembering something.

The images seem posed and candid all at once, as if the viewer has arrived just after something has happened—or just before it will.

Why Dolls?

Working with dolls lets me create visual metaphors that would fall apart with live subjects. The dolls don’t perform; they inhabit. They allow for a kind of distilled emotion, where vulnerability and absurdity coexist. I’m not interested in nostalgia, exactly. More in what happens when sweetness begins to sour—when the comforting becomes uncanny.

The pieces are also quietly funny, or at least strange in ways that flirt with satire. Some titles lean into B-movie absurdity. Others tap into old cinematic archetypes: the fugitive, the femme fatale, the tragic ingénue. Except here, the roles are played by creatures molded for playrooms.

Invitation to Look Twice

Ultimately, Baby Talk is about friction. Between innocence and artifice. Between the light we expect and the darkness that seeps in anyway. Noir irony plus Gothic ache.

Take a look at the series here, and let me know what you think. Which one particularly catches your eye?