  MASKS
I have been obsessed with masks since childhood.
As a small child, my parents moved to Africa. They were teachers
in the American school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. While there,
we traveled all over Africa. Some of the most memorable things
for me were the masks. The masks of Africa vary quite radically
from region to region, but they almost all have masks in their
culture. In fact, I think almost all cultures have masks of
one sort or another. Why is it that people want to be able
to be anonymous and/or become something or someone else? So,
needless to say my parents bought and took home to America
a number of masks. So I grew up with masks on the wall. They
would look down at me all the time. I sometimes would think
that they were there to protect me and sometimes think that
they were there to spy on me. When I began to draw and paint,
I naturally followed what I knew. I had seen and done lots
of things, but masks were always a more substantial and vivid
part of my life. I have been drawing various forms of masks
since I could pick up a crayon. So, here are a number of different
masks that I have created. Some are old, and some are more
recent. There will be more to come.
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"earth and sun" This is a mezzotint
etching I made in a class. This picture ended up begin used
for the cover of the campus literary journal "Bottomfish".
This one was used along with another one I made of a man wearing
a mask. I was part of the crew that edited the journal, so
who knows if i merited getting the covers or not! :) The journal
was a great thing, kind of like m10k. We got national submissions
of poetry and short stories and art. Then we would get to
read them all and select which ones would go in to the small
magazine. What a fun time that was. I got to read a lot of
good poetry and stories that I would never have seen if I
hadn't been involved.
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"Golden Sun" This is one of
the only two suns ever made. It was the pinnacle of my mask
making creativity. Monkey #1 and I were making masks for his
wedding. We had to make at least 80. His wedding had a masquerade
for the reception. So, we made almost 100 masks over a period
of 3-4 months. I had a bad tendency to spend way too much
time making mine. My project management skills really lacking
in this endeavor. The reason there are only two is that I
made the mistake of soaping the clay to make sure the fine
details didn't get stuck in the mold (as I had issues with
that earlier). The soap, if applied too liberally tends to
make the plaster of paris too brittle and it come off with
the neoprene. Needless to say the third one made from the
mold was a disaster and the mold was broken by me shortly
after (could have been a fit of rage, not sure). Anyway, I
am now, a few years later trying to get to the same point
where I made this mask. I will get there again some day. This
is the mask I wore at the wedding reception.
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2 masks from an art class morphing study
These were part of a larger drawing. The assignment was to
morph one image in to another over a series of drawings. I
incorporated a number of masks in the entire drawing but these
two are the better ones along with another in this gallery
"smiley".
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"alligator king" This mask
is part of my early testing while I get to know the material
again in mask making. As you heard above, I made some mask
with MonkeyPrime for his wedding reception. Then years went
by, and I didn't make any masks, and the neoprene I had turned
in to a solid block of plastic (seriously! It was gallon tupperware
container full of solid rubber). So I got the material again
just this year and have been slowly making a mask a month
or so. I am testing to find how the clay, plaster, and neoprene
I have works together. I also need to get my sculpting skills
back in to better form. So this and a couple others are the
early tests I did to get used to the material and my own rusty
skill. I thought that a small eye wrap mask would be a good
thing to try. I made one for the wedding of which I have no
examples unfortunately.
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"smiley" This is also part
of the morphing study I did in a class. I really like this
smiley. My son also likes it. I have a blown up picture of
it hanging on the wall, and he loves to look at it and laugh.
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"midnight sun" This is the
only other copy from this mold. This was to be my wife's mask,
but she chose another one I made of which i can't seem to
find. I liked the idea of having the two masks together the
dark and the light. This mask was displayed proudly in my
wife's office for many years.
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"shaman" This was also a Bottomfish
cover. I worked on this one for so many hours, I can't even
count. I don't think it shows, but it was a real learning
experience for me. With the mezzotint (forgive me if you know
this already), you take a metal plate and etch it until you
have a mass of small pits, essentially making it an even black
when inked. Then you take some sort of instrument and begin
to smooth out the pits in some sort of drawing. You can get
really nice gradient tones this way. You also have to think
in the negative, which is hard. So I spent hours trying to
get the gradients right and really think in the negative.
An issue that comes up with this kind of overworking though
is that you end up making the plate even more messy because
metal likes to begin flaking when it gets too worked. This
happened on this one quite a bit. Once I learned all these
lessons about mezzotints, I stopped making them! :)
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