jackets, masks and masks

Clothing as a mask, protective leather . . . and then the use of image as mask on top of that.

water light

Interesting how water, looking through water, makes me more aware of the action of light.  The thicker medium reminding that even in air light is affected: coloured, refracted, fractured, diffused, condensed, striated.

enlightening

In the same way that masks can work to conceal but also to present a particular version or aspect of a person, light too operates paradoxically, obscuring, revealing, changing things, showing textures and details, smoothing things out in a burn-out brightness (like snow on a landscape).

Until now . . .

I've always enjoyed playing around with some of the quirkier ideas to do with portraiture, initially just as fun and a break from my first impetus, which is to seek to draw out something I perceive to be 'within', whether I call it Hopkins' term 'inscape'  or 'identity' or something else.  The process for this first approach was all about looking, waiting, trying things out until something from within picture itself started speaking.  Sort of inside to outside.  These 'story' portraits or experiments began initially with an external idea or image and the work of the painting was a process of exploring that idea and what I thought about it.  Outside to inside, as it were.

An idea I've been coming back to for some time now is that of the ways we frame our (view of the) world, and the ways in which these frames also work to frame us too.  I've also long been intrigued by masks and goggles:  things we put on that protect, disguise, offer an alternate identity in someway.  It seems to have as much to say about who we are as the more apparently authentic presentations of identity.  We are what we hide behind perhaps?  Or the nature of multiple, shifting, contextual and constantly negotiated identity.

And of course these masks and goggles also act as frames.

Some of my earlier plays with this idea were quite explicit:  the series of three self-portraits:  Windows, Curtains and Seasonal Affect for example:

Less explicit were my two portraits of Bean, that work to frustrate the gaze of the viewer: they're portraits but not portraits in that they intentionally present a kind of unavailability of the subject, negotiated by the frame of the balcony structures, the protection of the leather jacket, the averted gaze.

These two led to the the more extreme framing that capturing movement and low light leads to, and the three 'lightshift' pictures that also comment on photographic imagery too.

And then, I came to the realization that even in some of what I considered my  more conventionally  expressive portraiture, these issues were muscling their way in . . . in all sorts of different ways, that I imagine I'll keep painting to work out:

 

I'm at the beginnings now of paying more attention to these things with a couple of new works to do more explicitly with goggles and eyes.