Exquisite Dolls Are a Mirror to Her Soul

Brigitte Starczewski-Deval makes dolls. Exquisite dolls. Dolls that wouldn’t look out of place in a painting by one of the old masters who inspire her.

In a craft demeaned by Barbies and Kens and countless other rubberized, plasticized, babbling, gurgling junk, Starczewski-Deval makes dolls for museums and collectors, for people who consider doll-making an art form.

For people who won’t wince at a price range of $2,400 to $14,000.

“It’s not a matter of moms’ buying for children,” said Thomas Boland, national distributor for the dolls.

Starczewski-Deval brought her entire current collection to Forever Children last weekend for the opening of Atrium Court in Newport Center Fashion Island; half a dozen of the smaller examples remain. Upcoming exhibitions include Tiffany’s in New York and the New York City Museum, according to Boland.

The dolls were first introduced to the United States six weeks ago; 15 stores in the country will carry them, but only Forever Children on the West Coast.

All of her dolls are for sale. Starczewski-Deval talked about what she felt makes the dolls so special, why even not-so-wealthy, “ordinary” people, having seen the dolls, will go away and save up for two or thee years before coming back to buy.

“The dolls have a certain beauty about them even if the actual features as a human face aren’t beautiful,” Starczewski-Deval explained through a translator. “Some of that beauty might lie, for instance, in the smoothness of the surfaces. Think of baroque sculptures, where sometimes you won’t be able to look at them because the faces are actually quite ugly.

“This is difficult to explain. . . . I try to bring into the doll’s face the expression of its soul. The expression is usually melancholy, the fragility in the look of a child. But they all have pretty much the same sort of expression. The form changes but--the soul is my soul.”

She is, then, a melancholy person?

“Might be. A little, yes.”

One casual observer also noted a certain physical resemblance between the artist and her creations.

Starczewski-Deval, 40, was born in Bavaria, the daughter of a portrait photographer; she made her first doll at the age of 6. In her early 20s, she moved to the Tuscany region of Italy; she now lives in a village there in a 10th-Century church with her husband and two children.

She models the heads, hands and feet of her dolls in porcelain, fires them, and dips them in liquid wax, giving the skin surface a slightly textured, life-like silky matte finish. The faces are painted, dipped in wax again, then subtly toned and shaded.

The eyes are blown glass; the wigs, designed by Starczewski-Deval, are mohair and undyed human hair. Starczewski-Deval also designs the clothes, which are then made by a local seamstress, often with antique fabrics, for which the artist is always on the lookout. The socks are cotton or silk, hand-knit by another woman living in a nearby village; the shoes are made by a local cobbler.

Leonardo da Vinci is but one of Starczewski-Deval’s inspirations; she said she can even be inspired by clouds seen outside an airplane window. (She always takes the heads with her, working on them even on an airplane from Italy to the United States.) One head can take up to 50 hours of sculpting; she works on several at a time.

Starczewski-Deval avoids the over-used facial expressions such as laughing and crying. She considers such faces grimace-like, forever fixed in a single expression with no real life. Rather, she feels expressions of joy or sadness should be implied--that the face should be on the verge of expressing an emotion.

Sentimentality has no place in this world: The dolls portray sensitive, complex, even difficult personalities, with all the ambiguities of adolescence, the conflicts and uncertainty. But also the charm.

“I try to express the children or adolescents who are not really understood,” she said. “I suppose because I felt like that when I was a child. And I’m sure that many, many children feel that way. I know that from personal experience with my daughter.”

Does she feel that she’s understood now that she’s an adult?

“No,” she said. “Many people don’t realize what’s in the dolls.

“Of course, there are a few who do.”