This trilogy of portraits that engage with the topic of masks and identity. The paintings have faces of the same person represented twice, once as a traditional portrait and second face with a mask.

The work acts as a realization of our collective desire to see beyond the mask. It plays with how ego and esteem functions behind our masks and also without them. In the sudden erasure of our facial identities we have simultaneously been comforted in our anonymity, annoyed that we cannot “show” ourselves, and wondered about completing the picture of the person in front of us. At a time when we are acutely aware of the power of the gaze (male and otherwise) the absence of the face, the power of the eyes, and our own voyeurism has become acute. We have existed behind a curtain and for the portrait painter the experimentation with these ideas is inevitable.

I was working as an instructor at the time of the doing this work and I had students volunteer to be photographed for the paintings.  The pictures where then uploaded into Photoshop and side-by-side portraits were created. This provided a template that allowed the images to be drawn and painted.

On the coast we live outside of History. War, famine, class struggle pass over here not disturbing the utopian bliss we have constructed. Since the environmental protests of the 90’s large historical movements have been absent from our consciousness, and we have filled the void with the drama of our own existence. Especially the young are seemingly insulated from the burdens of the past. The images inside this body of work use landscape as a frame for the space between the social and personal; landscape as the beautiful, rugged, wet, backdrop for the theatre of our own experience.

In part the work is derived from being at a distance both generational and national. Growing up in South Africa I was acutely aware of the world around me because politics effected our lives. As a teacher I worked with young people whose national lack of political awareness is compounded by time’s erasure of the past. The work utilizes imagery that explores the absence of memory and is interested in exploring the texture of existence here on the West Coast. The imagery juxtaposes history with the personal, opening a conversation of individual struggle in an absence of want.

Rope Swing is a particularly important image inside the body of work because it illustrates the idea of “being outside history”. The boy swings above a group of on-lookers, the swing is harmless, yet the image is disquieting as the rope is a signifier for something darker. A tension is built between the innocence of the early morning play juxtaposed with scenes that are part of our cultural experience of on-lookers in the antebellum south. They are not witnessing a murder, no self harm is being witnessed, yet the figure at the end of a rope casts a shadow over the group generating a space I want the work to hover in.

The pictures exist in a realm of memory and on one level they function as nostalgia and on another they strike an underlying sense of disquiet. At a time when discussions of privilege are so prevalent the images jostle with this notion juxtaposing a sense of empathy with a sense of our ahistorical existence

The best work in the series combine the lightness of a moment with a discordant note of apprehension, Young people fashion a swing, a car is parked in the woods, a couple takes shelter amongst logs on a beach, people look over a precipice in the fog, the absurdity of large flotation toys are carried towards the darkening trees.

Art rooted within the realm humanity, enables a meaningful aesthetic and story telling is the vehicle of towards are a relatable art. The narrative form opens literary possibilities of analogy and metaphor, it builds a frame for the political, and it becomes personal exploring expressions of the psyche and emotions. However the story in art, as Walter Benjamin laments, is increasingly becoming “remote”.
In a meditation on fiction Ken Lerner book re-commits to the novel because in-it lies “more interesting possibilities than determinism”. We are increasingly seeing people defined by their skin-colour, sexuality, age, gender, class, and privilege, the story allows us to see the possibilities and choices beyond these classifications stories explore what takes place when people collide. Returning to Benjamin he says: “it takes the representation of human life to its extremes … gives evidence to the profound complexity of living”. Continuing Lerner echoes Benjamin when he says “By integrating the social process with the development of the person (stories) bestows the the most fragile justification on the order determining it …it is this inadequacy that is realized”

Reading, “My Name is Asher Lev” one is struck with its utilization of the Crucifix as the culminating conflict in the central axis of the book. Potok writes about painting a crucifixion, “For all the pain you suffered, for all the torment of your past and future, for all the anguish … For (God) whose suffering world I do not comprehend, for the love I have, for all the things I should have remembered but have forgotten, because the crucifixion is the aesthetic mould into which you can pour a paintings ultimate anguish and torment.”
This why crucifixions remain a potent iconography. Another author Sherwood Anderson writes “Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.” In this sense we can all identify with the image of Jesus nailed to the cross.
Or from another perspective Kundera refers to the idea of “Eternal return” in his “Unbearable Lightness of Being” when referring to life lived as light and heavy. Picking up on the existentialist notion that we should act as if everyone should do as we do Kundera discusses how heavy an existence this notion presupposes. Borges reiterates this idea when he says: “What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men.” He continues, “For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race, for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.”

Living in Berlin I attended the Schaubuhne Theatre when they produced the play “2066” based on the novel written by Roberto Bolano. I had just read his book “Third Reich” and so I went home and influenced by the playwright’s ability to construct a new creative work from the novel. I stayed up late that night at the kitchen table and constructed the composition for this painting. I wanted to incorporate the game that is central to the title of the book, and I populated the composition with the stories key characters. Additionally, I wanted to reflect the books air of ambiguity around sexuality that can be at at once complex, intimate, obsessive, and coercive. The idea of memory or the unspoken or the missing other both private and historical were important elements to evoke.