Method: Think of a person for whom you have strong feelings or hold a strong opinion. Find an object or item of clothing that reminds you of that person. Make a piece of artwork that uses the object to provide the imagery but uses the materials to give the viewer a sense of the person. In effect, you’re making a portrait of a person as an item of clothing. You could use your daughter’s first shoes, your mother’s hat. Thinking more widely, you could use a blue tooth device and tie to make a piece of work about bankers or an old school tie wrapped around a silver spoon for our political class. Experiment widely and produce as many pieces as you need to until you arrive at something which you think fits.”

My first idea for this project was to portray my 104 year old Lisbon neighbor, Donna Hortense, through her laundry.

 

She hangs out some pieces of personal underwear from her window every day (possibly the rest of the laundry gets taken care of), and these intimate pieces drying also function as a flag saying- “I am up and about and well”.

I was too shy to ask Donna Hortense to borrow her underwear, so I went as far as buying a pair of giant underwear …

 

I will definitely come back to this idea.. But for now COVID- 19 swiftly changed our lives. We packed up the family and within a day are living in quarantine in the countryside.

The virus has infected all of our thoughts and conversations to start with. I managed to buy one mask for the five of us, and this lonely mask has become a symbol of this whole situation and the start of my new narrative.

On the exact opposite of a personal item, the mask blocks out part of the features and our personality seems to fade away behind it. In that sense, I want to use the mask to give a sense of the absence of the person, rather than the presence.I will draw it as if on the face though, not as if placed on a surface.

I start by trying out different materials.

Rembrandt dry pastel in skin tones on black paper ( a silky touch like skin):

I try baby pink pastels on white paper too- aiming at a connotation of innocence:

I continue experimenting with Winsor&Newton silver ink and Sennelier Indian ink for a metallic, shiny surface on black paper:

The same inks seem much warmer and softer on a warm grey paper:

I change for a transparent paper, with Indian ink and acrylics:

 

I like how the transparent paper wrinkles like a more alive surface. I also like the idea that I can hold it up to any face.

I push this idea of a mask that I can hold in front of a face further by using oil paints on glass. This ties in with a part of the parallel project where I have used oil paints for portraits of faces under water. I am using an old glass pane with some pink spray paint and a rusty border, which is quite creepy.

I want to try dripping the paint on the surface and allow it to pool, inspired by paintings by Genevieve Figgis.

Hmm, this looks like some sort of insect, interesting maybe, but not what I was aiming for. I have too little control when dripping on the glass.

I have another go using a brush and then just drop a few drops:

This is closer to what I was aiming for. The thick oilpaint looks chunky and velvety and the fluid brushmarks are very visible:

A very different surface is a rough burlap that I have stretched over a frame of 60x80cm

The burlap is so rough that I will place a sheet of paper under and use very diluted oilpaints, imagining that the paint that seeps through the holes onto the paper also could create an interesting ghost image. (It didnt’t, just some puddles)

I imagine a series of my family members behind the same (one and only) mask we have. The portraits all very classical, passport picture shaped, to emphasize the impersonal, and I would choose simple pencil drawings. Everyone has a pencil and it is so everyday shopping list familiar which in normal times would be so comfortingly incongruous with using a mask.

We are so lucky to have a garden we can still walk out into in these strange quarantine times and I start by taking a series of photos that I call “family picnic”: ( or “Dejeuner sur l’herbe 2020”)

I have the idea to use video again for this subject – drawing the faces lightly in pencil- which also feels impersonal- and then slowly erasing them til only the masks are left. I think using video that adds a dimension of (short) time to the images, is a very fitting media to describe the process of fading of the personality behind fear, rules and statistics in these strange times of quarantine.

I start by creating a series of pencildrawings, using pencils HB, 3B, 5B and 8B for a tonal drawing of each mask on our faces.

This is how they look all together in a series:

Keeping the drawings as a series instead of one big painting of a family picnic is showing the isolation and separation of this time too.

I continued with finishing the portraits of me and my partner and started with the fading of these in the below video. (The soundtrack is my granddaughter’s loud reaction to my daughter trying to wean her off breastfeeding when bringing her to sleep. )

 

 

This simple stop motion video creates so many feelings of fear and became unsettling to a point that I decided to stop here and not pursue my original idea of continuing this process with drawings of the kids. It is actually way more unsettling than I had expected and I am quite chocked at where this inquiry brought me.

In the BBC Scotland movie “Cornelia Parker- What do artists do all day”  (available on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7plwgxAzw), Cornelia Parker says about her work: “I am trying to unpick something that is a bit too hard to swallow”. It feels like what I am trying to do with this narrative.

Instead of continuing with the fading of drawings, I seek comfort in painting. I continue in oil on canvas, keeping this passport picture format, but with only the masks visible. The faces remain present in their absence from the classical portrait sized painting. It feels slightly incongruous to dedicate a series of oil paintings to a flimsy object like the mask. What I am painting here is my fears.

I am taking inspiration in the almost monochrome paintings of items like pill packs or pillows by Alex Hanna. I am also thinking of the row of soup cans by Warhol- a pop symbol of consumerism at the time and translating it into THE consumer product of 2020- the mask- so desirable that it is not available to purchase anymore.

Originally, I thought of keeping the paintings as impersonal as possible by leaving the background white, but hearing of Michael Borreman never starting on a white background, I decide to give each background a slight tint of colour, matched with the person. In that way this background becomes symbolic of the person.

This are the final paintings , oil on mounted canvas 5 times 35x45cm:

This is how the paintings look beside each other:

 

This series worked out the way I wanted and expresses the loss of personality behind the masks that I was aiming for. There is a certain helplessness in the way the masks are hanging in space, as if on invisible faces, rather than placed somewhere tangible with a cast shadow.

 

At this point, I realize that I have gotten so moved by the subject that I played it too safe with the materials and lost track of the aim of this project. I have not achieved any real sense of relationship , nor of incongruity between the subject and the material .

This mask is white, clean, soft, so it seems that a mask that would be dark, hard, in metal for example could be incongruous. But it just makes me think of another type of mask- a gas mask for example. The most incongruous I can think of would be a mask made of leaves and flowers or other natural materials. This mask speaks of danger and is artificial. Leaves would speak of nature. I created a Photoshop version of this idea:

I feel that I come dangerously close to a carnival mask though and will not pursue this.

Instead I think of the mask on incongruous supports. This connects to my parallel project, where I am using old items left behind by the former owners in my house between others, to explore the change happening here.

I decide that using the mask as  motive on an old vase or as a pattern of a lampshade will push it out of it’s normal reality in an interesting way.