I’ve been painting these faces using Chinese Ink, trying to make it a daily thing and seeing if this could evolve into more things for my project. I started off with random ink blotches, and then filling in the whites for the eyes. I then proceed to filling up these faces with various expressions. Would be great if I risoprinted these faces as the colours would turn out very vibrant.
Presenza Degli Antenati, 1970
Presence of the Ancestors
“When my grandmother Luigia would see a newborn baby, she would look him over and then, without taking her eyes off him, would say his nose is like his mother’s, his eyes are like his father’s, but his expression is like Aunt Bernarda’s who lives in Verona and never visits anymore; his ears are like your grandfather’s, his mouth is like my sister Kim’s. The baby would smile and my grandmother would continue: his smile is like your uncle’s whom we haven’t seen since he left town years ago and now works (or so he claims) in Australia, but we haven’t heard a thing from him in ages.
In other words, in a heterozygote, when the gametes are formed through a pair of alleles, half of the gametes contain one of the two alleles, the other half the other allele. According to the second law of Mendel, then, the alleles separate during meiosis, going off into different gametes. Thus the phenotypic division derives from the casual combination of gametes.”
-Pg 262, Far vedere l’aria, Bruno Munari, Air Made Visible, A Visual Reader on Bruno Munari
Drawings from Bruno Munari’s Design As Art (1966)
Look Into My Eyes by Bruno Munari
An exercise in seeing the world through the eyes of others. This artist’s book, first published in 1969 as a gift, contains 25 loose colored cards centered around the theme of faces. The pages can be mixed up as to vary their order and clustered into small groups to change the color of the eyes, turning Bruno Munari’s book the into a game of perspective. –Exile Books
I like the way faces are being presented in Munari’s work. The drawings from his book Design as Art could be a useful exercise to get me started with the creation of masks. Look into My Eyes on the other hand is a great way to present these masks in a book format. They have elements of interactivity as well, with each of them having die cuts of eyes and mouths. These elements of the faces remains constant while the faces change and when layered, the eyes could change colour. I find this book so simple yet brilliant.
This is a really cute way of creating character drawings out of really random doodlings.
By Faceheads
Tobias Gutmann is a swiss illustrator who travels around the world with his analogue portrait machine and draw faces of people. The Face-O-Mat lets Gutmann sit on one side of the machine, taking portrait requests from strangers. Gutmann’s interpretation of these faces are far from naturalistic and are very abstract. He rearranges the facial features but they still somehow look like a face. Gutmann is able to capture the essence of the person he is drawing, focusing on the distinguishable. The reactions of the people he drew are priceless. Some of them don’t actually agree that they look so abstract but an abstract portrait could very much show accurately the true nature of a person through the spontaneous and honest strokes.
The mask here stands for crude distinctions, the deviations from the norm which mark a person off from others. – E.H Gombrich, The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in Art
Masking, literally. Something I did for fun. Happy Sunday!
In this project, Shishi Yamazaki explores faces by making 1 different face every single day. She started off since May 11, 2010. There were only 27 experimental faces at the beginning but the collection grew more and more.
We can see Yamzaki’s masks evolving by the day as it takes on different forms that sometimes is not even identifiable as a face. Since the act of masking is to hide a person’s self, Yamazaki’s exploration on these different masks reflects how a person puts on a masks everyday in their lives.
Take-away: Taking on organic shapes and evolving these masks into undistinguishable features only shows how complex the manifestation of our characters are when we put it on show for others to see.
Images from: http://shishimask.tumblr.com
Multiple Identities of a Face 