I began to make skull portraits in order to reveal and record who my subjects were 'inside' as opposed to how they appeared on the surface. I leave you with a quote from Kahil Gibran's 'The Madman, his parables and poems'. "I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that was but a single countenance as if held in a mould. I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful it was. I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face in which all things were graven. I know faces because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath". And a quote from Nietzsche's 'My Sister and I': "Every occupation of man requires of him the wearing of a mask symbolizing his peculiar trade. These masks are in no way assumed, they grow out of people as they live, the way skin grows, the way fur devlops over skin. There are masks for the merchants as well as for the professors, there are masks that fit thieves and there are masks that look natural only on saints. The greatest of all the masks is nakedness. If I believed in God, this would be the mask I would conceive him in". |