Alice

Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass

“Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!"

Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.” 


“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”


Starting off my list of 31 literary ladies that I would want to hang out with, is Alice. She kept her head in a trippy world where everyone else was losing theirs. My Alice, unlike other representations I've seen, is a lot younger. I thought that the real Alice Liddell was about 7 or so when Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, started telling her the Alice stories. I wanted to paint a kid who was properly brought up according to the times but was sensibly having none of this nonsense from anyone: queens, chess pieces, cats whose heads floated in the air, talking caterpillars. She just goes with it.

Fun fact: When I was in college I had a mirror-image version of Jabberwocky hanging in our dorm room that I had painstakingly typed out with carbon paper to get the backwards effect.