Unquiet
Things

Knettell grew up in Connecticut, daughter of a Mad Men-era advertising executive, marinating in the sophisticated high-end commercial illustration that most people only glimpsed in glossy magazines. Her father showed her work by the great illustrators of the era, and she was captivated by their technical perfection. But what she brought to Jem left even that rarefied aesthetic education in the dust.

She didn’t work from photos or sketches, no way, that would have been too simple! She hired live models, had custom wigs made in the exact colors and styles of the dolls’ hair, commissioned replica costumes down to the last sequin, and then painted from life using airbrush over colored pencil. FOR DOLL BOXES. The woman was essentially staging full Broadway productions just to paint toy advertisements.

The world she was illustrating demanded this approach. Jem lived in a universe of pure visual excess where every outfit was a statement piece, every hairstyle defied physics, and every performance blazed with soap opera glam rock energy—part Joan Collins, part Lita Ford, all spectacular nonsense. The story followed Jerrica Benton, a young woman who inherited her father’s music company and used a holographic computer called Synergy to transform into Aquolina Pink Sugar-haired Jem, the lead singer of an all-girl rock band called the Holograms. The show ran from 1985 to 1988 as Jem and her bandmates battled their rival group, the Misfits, for musical supremacy while navigating romance, friendship, and the occasional kidnapping plot.

Every character was a living mood board, head to toe. Jem’s wardrobe included holographic bodysuits and gowns that seemed to be made of liquid metal, while the Misfits favored aggressive styling with electric colors, wild animal prints, fishnet mesh, and cascading fringe. This was the world that Knettell had to translate onto doll boxes—entire universes of fluorescent glam-rock fantasy compressed into a few precious square inches of cardboard real estate.

What she delivered feels almost impossible when you think about it. While most doll boxes featured flat, lifeless illustrations that could have been anyone in anything, her work practically vibrated with energy. She painted Jem’s metallic pink dress with actual reflective depth, each fold catching imaginary stage lights. Pizzazz’s lime green hair had sculptural volume and movement, every strand placed with surgical precision. The sequined details on their outfits weren’t shortcuts or suggestions; they were individually rendered points of light, each one a tiny star in her meticulous constellation.

Because Knettell worked from live models wearing actual replicas of the dolls’ outfits, complete with custom-made wigs in those impossible neon shades, every pose had the authentic electricity of a real performance. Her models were inhabiting these characters, leaning into microphones with breathless intensity, gripping instruments like talismans, caught mid-gesture in ways that suggested actual music was happening just outside the frame.

Those box illustrations remain seared into collective memory decades later with incredible clarity. Long after the show ended and the dolls disappeared from toy store shelves, Knettell’s artwork endures not just as nostalgic artifact, but as a visual language that defined an entire generation’s understanding of what glamour, glitter, fashion, and fame could look like. Her illustrations went beyond selling articulated fashion dolls to become cultural touchstones; they still influence how we think about fabulous 80s fashion, style, and aesthetics decades later. The sentimental pull and reverence is so strong that mint-condition Jem dolls in their original packaging now sell for thousands of dollars, with collectors specifically hunting down boxes featuring her work like they’re chasing down lost Rembrandts or something.

In an era before social media, before Instagram filters and digital glamour became ubiquitous, she was already painting with the hyperreal aesthetic that would define how we present ourselves online decades later. Those perfectly lit faces, those impossibly vivid colors, that sense of performative perfection, it’s all there in her doll box art, a crystal ball showing our future obsession with curated visual identity.

Knettell continues to paint, though her focus has shifted from commercial illustration to fine art portraiture. Working primarily from life rather than photographs, she creates sumptuous oil paintings that showcase the same technical wizardry she brought to those Jem illustrations, but with a quieter, more contemplative approach. Her recent work follows a similar style to 19th-century Impressionist Edgar Degas, but Knettell has a different angle: where Degas painted the often exploited young dancers of the Paris Opera, girls caught in a web of poverty and predation, Knettell focuses on contemporary female dancers wearing theatrical, fantastical costumes, gorgeous celebrations rather than somber documentations of their world.

Her current paintings feature life-sized figures in elaborate theatrical dress—a woman with bright teal hair adorned with purple flowers, wearing a sequined dress against a floral backdrop; a dancer in a vibrant red wig and heart-patterned tulle skirt, holding a single red rose like she’s accepting an invisible standing ovation; a ballerina in a fluffy pink tutu posed gracefully on a blue stool, every fold of fabric rendered with the same obsessive care she once lavished on Jem’s holographic gowns.

The same eye that could make Jem’s burnished minidress seem real enough to touch now captures the luminous whisper of light across a portrait subject’s face, bringing the same lyrical expressiveness and energy to fine art. Whether she’s painting rock stars for toy boxes or dancers for museum walls, Knettell understands something essential: art is about elevating the already extraordinary to the truly, truly, truly outrageous. That eight-year-old standing mesmerized in the Toys-R-Us aisle knew they were witnessing something magical, even if they couldn’t put it into words. Art is magic. And that kind of magic doesn’t just sell dolls—it makes kids believe in impossible things, elevates toy packaging to gallery-worthy work, shapes how entire generations think about glamour, and changes how you see the world.