In the decade preceding the 1969 moon landing popular culture was awash with space themes grounded in real scientific endeavour as well as science fiction. Elements of this excitement about humans pushing their boundaries appear in some of Margaret’s paintings, several of which have content and titles that appear to echo the unsettling niche of hybrid children seen by abductees.
For example in Alone (1962) we see a child, barefoot, arms folded over her knees, sitting alone on a metallic looking staircase that itself appears to be floating in space among stars. A blue Neptune-like planet hangs in the background. First Grail (1962) and The Runaway (1965) both show a tearful child with enormous eyes with black irises and hardly any whites visible. Alone, she stands in what looks like an alley or corridor casting a shadow that seems at odds with the scene’s lighting. Behind her is a diffuse glowing light. They both wear simple blue smock dresses (remember smocks are a detail recalled by one of Jacobs’ subjects but were also the dress of the Shalam Orphans). One stands barefoot, the other in black shoes and leggings. As is usual in Keane’s paintings they stare directly at us. What do they want?
From the late 1960s to 1980s Margaret Keane painted a number of portraits of imaginary children’s faces in boxes of various kinds. In several of these paintings faces peer out from what look like either metallic cubes or overwhelming silver picture frame mattes that reduce the canvas to a tight jet-black square around their faces. Their titles are ambiguous but appear to share a theme of the subject being both watchful yet captured: No Boundaries, 1969, The Prisoner, 1969, End of the Tunnel, 1972, The Witness, 1975.
In a television appearance on the Mike Dougas show in 1972 Margaret Keane described the child in one of these paintings, Jack in the Box. However, as was typical with Margaret’s interviews on light entertainment television, only the gentlest of interrogation about her art occurs. She says “I think he’s starting out on a little journey or something… he’s looking at the future.”
[Timestamp 6:40]
In another 1972 appearance on the same show (this timehttps://gideonreid.co.uk/part-11-angels-are-aliens/ located in Hawaii) after discussing several of her more traditional portraits – Margaret introduced a surrealist painting of disembodied grey faces that, like bubbles, appear to float against a silvery-grey background. They appear to be entering into or exiting from a jet-black circle in the background. Lines radiate from it. Calling it Reborn she remarks, “It could be the year 2000…I thought of them [the disembodied faces] as souls being reborn.”
[Timestamp 7:52]
She returns to a similar image later in her career in 2018, which she calls A World Within. This time some of the sphere’s contain her hallmark eyes.
But “souls reborn” where? A “world within” what?
To journalist and ufologist John Keel, – who rejected the idea of extraterrestrial visitation and wrote about the interconnectedness of perceived anomalies arguing that they were all caused by an intelligence outside our limited spectrum of perception – the answer to this might just as likely be a “flying saucer” as anything else. In his view it might simply be another case of strange things being dropped to the earth: metal slag, plastics or perhaps in this case, seeds. Their purpose being to provide clues to lead us to the eventual realisation that a superior non-human intelligence is real and is for some reason toying with us, showing us glimpses of another world within our own.
Margaret’s idea of “souls being reborn” into some future state is also perfectly in keeping with the hybrid children theme of alien abduction where human biology is harvested, repurposed and then presented to us for some kind of approval or acknowledgement. But it also chimes with long standing UFO lore that posits that the earth is a garden seeded by a higher intelligence. .
In fact she appears to reference this in two paintings that show these souls actually growing out of the earth. The same spherical bubble-like face appears in the center of a blue flowering plant in an undated painting Flower Child. Its roots penetrate beneath layers of soil seen as if contained in a transparent enclosure like that in a biology classroom for the purpose of demonstrating root development. A similar motif is found in Bottle Eyes (2008) where amongst green leaves Keane faces sit atop organic growths resembling flower stamens.
The theme of End Times, apocalypse and epochal change are found in contactee stories, and in a darker form with the alien abductions that followed. From the warnings against nuclear weapon use to the terrifying visions of earth ravaged by fire floods or earthquakes that are frequently part of the telepathically induced visions they receive whilst transfixed by the enormous eyes of their alien captors.
It’s difficult not to read the paintings Margaret created later in her career while living in Hawaii as products of an informed artist quietly acknowledging these overlapping themes and their double meaning.
The first meaning for Margaret, who became a born-again Jehovah’s Witness in her mid-forties, is almost certainly a reference to the millennial age—the restoration of paradise on earth that would occur after the apocalypse that the Witnesses prophesied to occur after these end times. She painted celebratory brightly coloured commissions to be hung in the faith’s Kingdom Hall.
In Tomorrow’s Future, created in 1990, she not so subtly depicts a crowd of fresh-faced infants from various races. They possess the trademark oversized eyes and are tightly packed into a sphere in space that exhibits qualities of both a planet and a tunnel. The central figure’s fingers grip the rim of the circle, disrupting the illusion of a three-dimensional sphere.
But another reading might ask if this new triumphant kingdom she depicts is on earth or actually the colonisation of another planet altogether, a nod to science fiction ideas, perhaps, or acknowledgement of second meaning – that of hybrid beings populating new worlds.
Summary
- Keane’s paintings show futurist, surrealist, and science fiction influence
- SF, UFO lore, (and to some extent the Jehovah’s Witness faith) and Oahspe all share similar themes:
- Earth as a laboratory/garden tended by a higher intelligence
- Earth viewed from outside
- Planetary colonisation
- End times / cataclysm
- Epocal change
- Restoration
- The titles and content Margaret gives her paintings indicate her awareness of the above