From an article in Planet Magazine by Dr. Peter Wakelin.
Definite personalities fascinate children – we have all had favourite aunties, liked strange characters and been drawn to the unusual. This can be difficult to capture in visual art, but some artists have succeeded at conveying characters that children will find interesting. Philippa Robbins has created a whole set of characters especially for this exhibition. They might appear scary at first, but they will make lots of children laugh, and they form a memorable family like you’ve never seen before. She says:
“Dora is a flat, tin Day of the Dead character. She is simply made and there’s something endearing about her despite her being a skeleton. Children are attracted by so many stimuli – from pastel to primary colours, miniature to the grandest scales, and all subject matters, so in deciding how to approach these paintings I drew on things that delighted me as a child. I was often drawn to vulnerable and unusual characters and could invest just about anything vaguely animate – dolls, mummies in the British Museum, animals – with an imagined empathy, a secret connection. As a skeleton there’s something dark about Dora, but if she’s scary, she’s safely scary like Stig of the Dump.”
Read more here.