I once created a oil pastel canvas of an abstract African mask I dreamed up one day. This was long ago back in 2004, during high school I took. Ever since then, masks represented something unique to me. It represents the different selves we have inside us. Recently a mask has been haunting my thoughts for a few weeks now and I have a yearning to recreate it. The mask was split into different sections to represent the major different experiences/emotions, combined to make up the human experience.
You know me, I have to throw in some Star Trek reference in here somewhere, so bear with me. I mean, seriously? This blog would not be complete without that. The concept of the mask is very similar to an artifact that Captain Picard was gifted in an episode of The Next Generation. The artifact is a clay-like statue that can be opened to find several little statues that represent the different voices inside of us all. It looked like this artist’s rendering.
When I graduated, I gave away some of my artwork to the counseling department at the school, including the mask canvas. I had worked in there as an aide and many of the counselors had been very helpful and supportive. I took picutres of the artwork, but I regret that I can no longer find them. I think I lost them in the process of moving shortly after my high school graduation. A picture of the mask canvas would have been a great inspiration for creating another piece of work.
When you create artwork, it is helpful to come up with a concept of what you want to create before you even start painting or drawing anything. Many times this concept is the foundation for a large body of several works. Sometimes you get ideas for a concept by doing art history research or by studying your favorite artist and their works. Sometimes you get ideas from the events happening in your life first and then you research artists to find out ways to express that concept, with your own twist. Otherwise, it is very hard to illustrate a concept in a meaningful and constructive way in a vacuum. For this reason, artists keep and maintain an art journal.
For this particular piece of work, I am drawn to the geometric elements of cubism (of which Pablo Picasso co-founded) combined with the distinctive brush strokes of post impressionism (the most famous example is Van Gogh’s Starry night, but is far from limited to that). I am not sure if I will be able to combine these elements — or that if I want to in the end, but I just know that these two methods of expression are appealing to me the most. It is a start.
Vincent van Gogh
Another artist that appeals to me for this concept is Romero Britto, a rather popular Brazilian artist here in South Florida. Many of his works are exhibited around Miami and Miami Beach. He combines cubist elements with pop art, although I am less into the pop art aspect and more into his use of shapes to create people and objects.
Romero Britto
Anyway, when I think of the human experience I think of it as a sum of intense emotions rather than specific events. I believe that emotions are one of the major factors that separate humans from other animals; any living thing can be born, be joined, reproduce, and die. Actually, I am not sure that animals don’t experience emotions — I would think that they are able to experience particularly intense emotions, but rather they aren’t able to critically process it and act on it the way that humans do. In this case, I also do not include typical emotions and actions than one experiences in the daily grind of life, because again, this is not particularly unique to humans.
The other reason is that one specific event may conjure different emotions at different levels for different people. So the event itself can be seen as emotionally unique to each person. For example, death can be welcomed with contentment and happiness to a well-lived person, but fear and regret in another person. Conversely, two separte events can conjure up the same general feelings within the same person.
These are the four general emotional states — or in this case, masks – that I feel sum up the human existence:
1) Euphoria, which includes feelings of intense happiness, contentment/peace, joy, excitement, and ecstacy. Another word I can think may qualify is joyfear, which is coined by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. However, I think this one falls in the gray area between euphoria and passion.
2) Passion, which includes feelings of love, lust/desire, hate, danger (as in fight or flight) and anger. I may dedicate another post to why I group these emotions under passion instead of placing passion in its own category. But in short, all of these emotions are motivators. They compel people to do something (often drastic) so in that sense they are different from euphoria which is not a motivator in and of itself, once you have it. Passion itself can be considered a combination of lust/desire and hate or anger (whether they are channeled into positive or negative actions).
3) Melancholy, which includes feelings of sadness, disappointment, depression, illness, and lethargy. Many people operate under melancholy on a day-to-day basis, but there are also acute forms of melancholy that don’t extend for very long periods of time. These occur when in some way your expectations have not been met and you are often forced to examine why you feel that way or why a situation turned out the way it did. This emotion can also be channeled into both negative and positive ways.
4) Fear, which includes fear of loss and actual feelings of loss. This is a more intense form of melancholy — think of suffering from a soul-crushing heartbreak. These emotions work similarly to passion but often in the opposite direction. Instead of working as motivators, they work as inhibitors. People suffering from these emotions withdraw on a grand scale and close themselves off from people and experiences completely. Unlike with melancholy, people operating under fear avoid trying to face these emotions and examine the situation at hand, Therefore it is much harder to grow away from it.
Even though I have categorized these emotional states into separate boxes, I am not under the illusion that there are no gray areas where more than one emotional states can exist at the same time and at varying levels (much like joyfear). Perhaps it is actually these gray areas that make us even more humans and less “instinctual.” I am not sure how to illustrate these gray areas within my artwork, but it’s something I need to ponder on.
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