Behind the mask

"Behind every mask there is a face,
and behind that a story."

-- Marty Rubin

Self portrait 9-25-13

"I hold my face in my two hands.
No, I am not crying.
I hold my face in my two hands
to keep the loneliness warm --
two hands protecting,
two hands nourishing,
two hands preventing
my soul from leaving me
in anger."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

"We were not meant to mask ourselves before our fellow-beings, 

but to be, through our human forms, 

true and clear utterances of the spirit within."

-- Lucy Larcom

"Because the mask is your face,

the face is a mask ..."

-- Faith Ringgold

Beneath the sur-face

"For her face was no more than a cover of skin, 

showing nothing of the terrible, complicated things, ugly and beautiful, 

that were going on inside her."

-- Douglas Woolf, Wall to Wall

Self portrait 9-19-13

"One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, 

was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why it had been put there."

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick

"All art is at once surface and symbol

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril."

-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Never never never give up

"... it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be,

it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect."

-- Lev Grossman, The Magician King

Self portrait 8-2-13

"She had changed in ways she would never have been able to anticipate.

She had become the kind of person who was barely able to get out of bed

in the morning without buckling beneath the tidal pull of the planets."

--  Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

"Perseverance is the hard work you do 

after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did."

-- Newt Gingrich

My mom has a refrigerator magnet with a famous quote from Winston Churchill.  

It says "Never never never give up."

It's a lovely thought. Nice advice. I'm sure it works for some people.

It's a good mantra for those persevering types -- the scrappy ones, the fighters, the tough guys, the folks with lots of tenacity and chutzpah -- folks like my mom, who has been through some pretty tough life, but who keeps bouncing back. You can knock her down, but she won't stay there. 

I have inherited a lot of traits from my mother -- good ones and other ones -- but I feel like I lack her fighting spirit. 

I mean, I'm fighting. I've fought. But lately, it seems like I'm just taking ineffective, lazy, punch-drunk swings at an opponent who is bobbing and weaving and pummeling the shit out of me round after round, throwing punches I never see coming.

I'm sure it's the fatigue talking, but after being awake for 42 hours straight, giving up sounds like a good option. 

Laying down on the mat for a good long 10-count sounds blissful.

Ding the bell.

Throw in the towel.

I can't take another round.

When I get like this, when my knees are buckling and the world feels like it's tipping, I'm glad I have people in my corner who are helping to prop me up.

I have two sleep specialists -- a psychologist who is handling my sleep counseling, and a psychiatrist/sleep medicine physician who is helping sort out my biochemistry to get to the root of my insomnia.

They are asking me questions, looking hard at my sleep behaviors, poking around in my brain to help me figure out and fix whatever has gone so impossibly haywire.

There are other people, too.

My husband and my sons have shown me unbelievable patience and kindness. Trust me, they have more of a right than anybody to launch an uppercut at my chin, but they don't.  They are sensitive about when I need some space, and when I need a good laugh, and when I don't know what I need at all. If I am too tired to participate, they understand. Or at least they pretend to, anyway.

I have a couple of friends who check in periodically and ask -- really ask -- how it's going. They tolerate my long silences and absences without making me feel like I'm the shittiest friend on the planet.

I have a sister who remembers stuff -- like that I was going for my first sleep evaluation appointment -- and texted me to say good luck.

I have an acupuncturist who can work miracles.

I have a massage therapist who knows, without me saying a word, exactly what I need.

I have "M," my secret weapon.

And I have my faces. 

The funny thing about a 365-days project is that it trundles along no matter how I feel. It doesn't care if I slept or not, or have pain or not. It's just exists, a day at a time.

And there's still lots of time to go. 

It's only August, and there are five full months remaining in this year. 

If filling those five months with a face a day helps get me through the hardest parts of re-claiming healthy sleep, then I'll lean into it as hard as I can and hope it holds me up.

I can't give up on this project.
I won't give up on this project.

Never, never, never. 

Maybe I am a little bit of a fighter after all.

I got it from my mama.

Hold on

"I like to use my hands and make things ...

It might seem pretty stupid or  pointless but that doesn't matter ...

Some of the most interesting work is the stuff that starts like that --

out of a raw need for activity."

-- Bruce Nauman

Self portrait in polymer clay 7-7-13

“I don't want to be the one who says life is beautiful.
I want to be the one who feels it.”

-- Marty Rubin

A touchy subject

"Only a girl like this
can know what's happened to you.
If she were here she would
reach out her arms towards
you now, and touch you
with her absent hands
and you would feel nothing, but you would be
touched all the same.”

-- Margaret Atwood, "Girl Without Hands"

Self portrait 6-11-13

  

“I know it’s hard for you to allow yourself to feel this. 

You've gone so long training yourself to block the feelings and emotions out 

any time someone touches you.” 

-- Colleen Hoover, Hopeless

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us,

we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures,

have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds 

with a warm and tender hand."

-- Henri Nouwen

Gettin' my glow on

“Whatever you are physically...male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy --

all those things matter less than what your heart contains. 

If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. 

All those other things, they are the glass that contains the lamp, but you are the light inside.”

-- Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

 

Self portrait 6-3-13

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. 

No matter how fast light travels, 

it finds the darkness has always got there first, 

and is waiting for it.”

-- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man  

“But you can't stay in the dark for so long. 

Something inside of you starts to fade 

and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light.”

-- Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

Burn, baby

“...that yearning inside you that seeks for fulfillment -- does it still burn?...”

-- John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

Thrift store doll with cutout hands, lighter, cigarette and eyes 5-7-13

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

                                                                                                             -- Plutarch

“This disease of curiosity.”

                                                                                                  -- Augustine of Hippo

Tangled up in blue

 

“You can keep as quiet as you like, 

but one of these days somebody is going to find you.”

                                   

         -- Haruki Murakami, IQ84

Self portrait 5-2-13

 

“She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by --
And never knew.”

                                                                                 -- Shel Silverstein, Everything On It

 

True confessions of a cutter

“In her more lucid moments, she knew that half her life 

had been sacrificed to safeguard her secret heart, 

to appease that unreasonable, mortal dread she suffered 

of being suddenly revealed to others in a nakedness of spirit 

that terrified her more than the concept of God's own retribution itself.”

-- Raymond Kennedy, Lulu Incognito

Collage 4-25-13

 “That was the irony of Lulu's days; 

that she who lived in a torment of concealment 

had never known a moment when she did not feel 

the eyes of conscience upon her.” 

-- Raymond Kennedy, Lulu Incognito

On rainy days, when she was in a good mood and usually after a feverish bout of house cleaning, my mother would give me and my sisters her old magazines to cut up and paste into collages. 

Mostly she read Redbook.  The covers were warped and stiffened from the wet rings of coffee cups and Pepsi cans. Some of the pages were folded in half, diagonally, right through the middle, marking something my mother must have thought was important, or worth remembering later. The boxes of the quizzes were filled in with her funny looking, left-handed, backward-facing checkmarks.

My mother's magazines did not interest me until they became the raw material for art. I could spend forever cutting and creating with my dull-tipped safety scissors and squirt bottle of Elmer's glue. I usually made faces (go figure!)  I should say, I re-made faces, switching out the eyes, noses, mouths and hair of the beautiful models and transforming them into something a little less lovely, but definitely more interesting. In my little-kid collages, the proportions were all mixed up and wonky. The eyes didn't match. The mouths were huge. The noses went in the wrong direction, like Picasso. 

I wasn't trying to make anything meaningful or profound or controversial or attractive. 

I was just making.

Psychologists and therapists often use collage as a non-threatening art therapy tool that helps clients communicate their feelings, thoughts and emotions. According to art therapist Cathy Malchiodi:

"Magazine photo collage is widely used by art therapists largely because it's a forgiving medium, especially for individuals who are intimidated by pencils, paint, or clay. In making a collage, you don't have to go through the agony of drawing something realistic and are spared the feeling of embarrassment that your pictures look like a ten-year-old drew them ... It also doesn't demand an immediate commitment like a brushstroke across a canvas. In fact, until you glue the images to a surface, you can change your mind, experiment with composition, and add and subtract pictures until you get it right." 

(Read more at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-healing-arts/201002/cool-art-therapy-intervention-10-magazine-photo-collage) 

I don't make collages much anymore. I made a few mixed media pieces during my "No Day Without Art" project last year. But we have had some pretty rainy days here lately and the magazines have been piling up, so I decided to go for it. There are men putting new siding on our house right now and it was kind of a weird, unsettling fishbowl experience having dudes in tool belts right outside my window while I was cutting and pasting pictures of naked ladies and eyeballs and popsicles. But hey. The show must go on.

And I must say, the collage-bug bit me again. Pretty hard. Cutting out images with an X-acto knife is super-therapeutic. Way better than safety scissors. And in case you're thinking about trying a collage yourself, glue sticks and spray adhesive make a much smoother finished product than good old Elmer's.

I know there are collage artists who do amazing, unbelievable things with this medium. Wanna get blown away? Check out the work of Derek Gores http://derekgores.com/. I don't expect to approach anything near his kind of genius with my humble collages. But I like to think that he and I can share the same swept-away,  complete absorption of losing-yourself-in-art feeling. On his website, Gores says he isn't interested in "heavy, conscious concepts" with his art, but that he is "always hoping for that feeling of having the senses of a kid, where everything is new." 

Yeah. 

Me too.

Bruiser

“Some bruises you wear like badges of honour: 

when you got it playing rugby, or quad racing, or falling off something while drunk, 

no opportunity is lost to show off a good contusion. 

A bruise inflicted by someone else, however, is a whole other story: 

it's like a big flashing arrow marking you out as punchable."

                                                                                                             -- Paul Murray

Son Gohan and Joe 4-10-13

There's a new troublemaker causing a ruckus here at A Face A Day.

His name is Son Gohan and he's a character from a Japanese manga series called "Dragon Ball."
I only know this information because I looked him up on the Internet.
I don't really know anything about manga, or anime. Nor do I care. All I know is that I got a pretty angry action figure for 99 cents at the thrift store.

His face looks like this.

All the time.

Son Gohan 4-10-13

His arms move a little bit, but they don't go all the way down, so he's always got his dukes up, like he's perpetually looking for a fight -- or perpetually in a fight -- constantly throwing, or blocking, a punch. Also, he twists at the torso, but his legs don't move, so his stance is fixed and rigid.

Sadly, there are people in the world who are a lot like that.

People who are perpetually looking for a fight. People who are forever stuck in a fixed and rigid stance.

Inflexible people.

Angry people. 

With angry faces.

He and Joe got into a bit of a scrap.
Actually, Son Gohan kind of beat the shit out of Joe.
But it's all good. Joe's tough. Joe's flexible. He'll bounce back.

Sleepy head

“I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. 

Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. 

I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. 

That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.” 

-- Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower 

Polymer clay sleepy face 3-2-13

Seeing red

I can't say this without a thousand words.

Self portrait 1-27-13