Was Margaret aware of stories about alien abduction or of children seen inside UFOs, or had she herself had a similar vision?
The answer may lay in a consideration of the playfulness evident in Margaret’s paintings and how she acknowledges other motifs in art history. We see this in the tilted head position from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus that finds its way into numerous Margaret Keane paintings of young women.
Another motif is found in a pencil sketch titled The Child Within, 2017, that mimics another famous eye illustration by Dutch artist M.C. Escher, 1946. In Escher’s illustration, a close-up of his own eye, we see reflected in the dark of his pupil a human skull.
Such memento mori are said to be a reminder to the viewer of their own mortality. Sometimes they were playfully hidden in paintings such as that of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, 1533, a double portrait of two men, that has in its foreground the image of a distorted skull. It only becomes comprehensible as such when the viewer looks at the painting from an acute angle.
In Keane’s version the reflected face doesn’t appear to be a skull but the blurred image of grey child-like face. The eye seeing it appears even wider than the usual Keane eye, as if staring in disbelief, wonder, or perhaps even horror.
Animals as Screen Memories
In what is perhaps another playful nod toward the abduction phenomenon is Keane’s use of animals in her paintings. In a number of abduction accounts animals are seen prior to abductees memories of their encounter being “wiped”. Called “screen memories” they represent an illusion deliberately placed by mischievous shape-shifting abducting beings – as John Mack writes they can be “owls, eagles, raccoons, and deer” – and they provide either a lure to the abduction encounter location, a mask to the horror of the aliens’ true appearance, or both.
I Know That Face, I’ve Seen Those Black Eyes
With this in mind we can return to what is probably the most famous illustration of an alien being, the Ted Seth Jacobs cover art for Communion.
Strieber dictated how the image should resemble the creatures that he says took him from his bed one night in 1985. It is of a gaunt pale-faced creature with a pointed chin, vestigial nose and mouth. It has no ears. Its eyes are entirely black apart from two specular highlights making them appear shiny.
Strieber’s friend at the time, Budd Hopkins, expressed his dismay at this image. MUFON journal published his criticism of what he considered glaring mistakes of form. For him the eyes were all wrong, being too far up the head making it appear “pinheaded” because it failed to show the large cranium that featured in most abduction accounts.
Despite this apparent inaccuracy there are many stories1 of people drawn to this image across the floors of bookstores, reacting viscerally to the face that somehow seemed familiar to them. It’s a penetrating stare from a virtually expressionless face with just the hint of a smile. “I know that face”, “I’ve seen those black eyes..but where have I seen them?” one man wrote in a letter to Hopkins after seeing the book cover.
However, were people triggered into reacting, saying they knew that face because it more closely resembled Margaret Keane’s paintings than any previous illustration (or encounter with) an alien?
Consider the illustrations below. Which images contain the most points of similarity to Ted Seth Jacobs painting? Illustrations of grey aliens done by witnesses in the years prior to its 1987 publication or the various faces of women Margaret Keane painted in the 1960s?
In 2003 Margaret Keane in one of her animal portraits created a painting she titled, All Dressed Up. It’s of a white dog in a gold necklace and fur coat. Perhaps it is a reference back to Fredrick Dielman’s Uncle Toby, 1861, a portrait of a dog in a fine lace collar. However a closer look reveals striking similarities in proportions to Ted Seth Jacobs painting. The shape of the face, the relation of the eyes to the top of the head – the same detail that Hopkins claimed was wrong and is found in many of Margaret’s other paintings of young women – the bolt upright posture, even the specular highlights of the black eyes all appear in the same place. It’s almost as if the dog were a screen for an alien that is all dressed-up…
Margaret Keane, All Dressed Up, 2003 (left)
Communion, Ted Seth Jacobs, 1987 (right)
Summary
- Margaret Keane demonstrated a playful awareness of other artists motifs and symbolism
- The “wrong” famous alien face from Communion is compared to Keane’s paintings of young women and to previous witness drawings of alien faces – [Which set of images are most similar to you?]
- Assuming she was aware of alien abduction lore, does she comment on it and acknowledge her own influence on it in her later works such as All Dressed Up – done years after the abduction heyday of the 1990s?