detail from "the bride"
After her Operas Paula began to work a series on paintings on courtly love. As she progressed the female figure began to remind her of the young women in the 'Vivian Girls", a series of pictures by Henry Darger that she had seen in the "Outsider Art" exhibit. The people who organized the exhibit were struck by Paula's enthusiam and sent her an article on Darger. After reading the article Paula decided to drop the theme of courtly love and paint scenes from the lives of the Vivian Girls. The Vivian Girls were the heroines of the novel "The Story of the Vivian Girls in What is Called the Realms of the Unreal or the Glandelinian War Storm or the Gaudico-Abbiennian Wars" which Darger had written and illustrated. Darger was a sort of unusual man who spent most of his adult life from 1916 to his death in 1972 working by day as a bandage roller and a toilet cleaner in a Chicago Hospital, while devoting the rest of his time to his great passion in life, this one huge novel. When he died they discovered that he had written a 13 volume saga about the exploits of a gang of girls who lived on a planet controlled by wicked soldiers. The story contained endless accounts of the ways in which the girls got the better of the soldiers. The girls and their pranks was very appealing to Paula who set to work immediately, painting directly on canvas for the first time since the 1960's.
the vivian girls breaking the china
the vivian girls with windmills
