Masks

The world wide web has provided exhibitionists with their ideal medium: cheap, easy, and with global distribution. Many display themselves totally, but others are shy pornographers, reticent about revealing their true identities: their faces. These last go to imaginative lengths to create masks from the minimal to the baroque. These masks - I show only a few of the hundreds I've collected - constitute a nearly extinct sub-genre of folk art. The "true" exhibitionists have prevailed in their insistence that faces are as strong an erotic component as other body parts and should be displayed. It has become difficult for exhibitionists to preserve their anonymity!

In the Spring of 2003 I was able to make digital prints of about twenty of these masks. Each print is 44" square. The pictures here are not necessarily those I printed.

In the course of collecting Chinese seals I got caught up in 'seal script,' an ancient Chinese calligraphic form in use now almost exclusively for personal seals (chops) and occasionally for calligraphic scrolls.

Seal script, unlike 'regular' Chinese script, allows of nearly infinite formal variations. I started doing my own calligraphy and began to translate some pithy Chinese sayings--some of which are nearly equivalent to English proverbs--into seal script. Some sayings were turned into etching plates and printed in November, 2002 at the Vermont Studio Center. I combined the etched plates with red impressions from actual seals.

A common feature of Asian prints is the vacancy of their centers, a allusion to religious notions of 'emptiness,' 'nothingness,' and similar inaccurate Western translations. I made this vacancy central to my prints as well, with the impressions, both etchings and the seal impressions, surrounding the open center as they do in many originals.

I include below some enlarged details to give a sense of what the prints look like close-up.

Chinese Prints