I am including this page to show my paintings that are not part of my conceptual iterations, but still exist as they are a part of my process. I am also extremely fascinated with with the face.
The Face
The face is the most important icon in our lives. From birth, before we understand language, before we know the meaning of images or symbols, we encounter the human face. We search it for recognition, comfort, response, and connection. The face is among our earliest experiences of another human being.
Before we understand words, we are already learning to read faces. We respond to the eyes that meet ours, to expressions of pleasure or distress, to attention and its absence. The face becomes a site of communication long before language gives us another means of describing what we experience. It is our first encounter with the visible presence of another consciousness.
Throughout life, we continue to read faces. A face tells us who is familiar and who is a stranger. We search it for emotion, intention, recognition, age, history, and traces of experience. We look into another person’s face and attempt to understand what cannot actually be seen: the person within.
Yet the face is never simply biological.
As we enter the social world, the face accumulates meanings. We learn not only to recognize faces but to interpret them according to the structures of the cultures in which we live. We learn what expressions are appropriate, what must be concealed, when to look and when to look away. We learn to present ourselves to others and, consciously or unconsciously, to construct an image of ourselves for them.
The sociologist Erving Goffman understood the self not as something expressed independently of others but as something continually negotiated through social interaction. His concept of “face” extends far beyond the physical face. Face becomes the socially presented self, the identity we claim and that others may accept, challenge, affirm, or deny. We maintain face, lose face, save face, and participate in preserving the face of others. In this sense, the face exists within a complex network of relationships.
This has always fascinated me because the face is therefore both biological and constructed. We are born seeking it before we understand what society is, yet society subsequently teaches us how to read it.
The physical face itself also occupies a peculiar position. It is ours, perhaps the most immediately identifiable part of who we are to other people, yet we cannot directly see our own face. We know it through mirrors, photographs, reflections, representations, and the responses of others. Other people know our faces in a way that we ourselves cannot.
The face is simultaneously intimate and public.
It is also individual and universal. No two faces are precisely identical, yet the arrangement of eyes, nose, mouth, skin, bone, muscle, and expression is immediately recognized as human. The smallest variations can produce an entirely different identity. Within this shared biological structure resides seemingly limitless difference.
And we assign extraordinary meaning to those differences.
We use faces to determine identity, ancestry, age, gender, emotion, beauty, illness, authority, vulnerability, familiarity, and difference. Sometimes we perceive accurately. Sometimes we project. Sometimes the face becomes the surface upon which society places assumptions that tell us far more about the observer and the culture than about the person being observed.
For an artist, the face therefore presents an inexhaustible subject.
Perhaps this is why I have returned to it again and again throughout my life. I did not begin with a decision to make the face the subject of a lifetime. Only in looking backward across decades of drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, and other works do I recognize how persistently it has been there.
Some of these faces belong to people I know. Some are self-portraits. Some are observed, remembered, imagined, altered, or constructed. They were made at different times, for different reasons, through different media. They do not constitute a single series. Their relationship is something more fundamental: the face itself has continued to reappear.
For me, the face has never been simply a likeness.
A portrait can resemble a person perfectly and still tell us very little about that person’s actual experience. Conversely, a face that has been distorted, fragmented, patterned, reconstructed, or invented can sometimes reveal something that likeness alone cannot reach. Representation does not have to reproduce appearance in order to investigate identity.
This question eventually became explicit in my Face Pattern work. There, the face becomes a terrain upon which other structures and systems can exist. Pattern crosses and penetrates the apparent boundary of the individual. Interior and exterior become less certain. The face remains recognizable as a face, but it also becomes something else: a field of relationships.
Yet Face Pattern did not create my interest in the face. It emerged from a my decades long engagement with it.
Looking across these works now, I recognize that I have been asking variations of the same questions for much of my life: What do we see when we look at another human being? What do we believe we see? How much belongs to the person before us, and how much do we bring to that encounter ourselves? Where does biological identity end and social identity begin? And can the visible surface of a face ever reveal the complexity of the life that exists behind it?
The face is our first human image and one of the last we ever cease to seek.
We recognize one another through it. We communicate through it. We construct identity upon it. We remember those we love through it. We search faces for evidence of lives that, ultimately, we can never completely know.
I continue to return to the face because I have not exhausted it.
I don’t believe I ever can.
In this page I have created 2 separate galleries with images of faces I have created. The first gallery will be paintings, the second gallery will be drawings and printmaking (works on paper). These works span decades and I will try to place the beginning ones at the end of each gallery. As of today if you read this I have not created the second gallery – the works on paper gallery, nor have I found all my most recent simply face paintings.
