Shadow puppet

"Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.

Carl Jung called it his shadow work. He said we never see others.

Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them.

Shadows. Projections. Our associations."

-- Chuck Palahniuk

Self portrait 10-27-13

"What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body,

but the body of the soul."

-- Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates

"How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow?

I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole."

-- C.G. Jung

This is a self portrait of me, as well as a portrait of my own shadow.

So if they're both me, then who's pulling the strings?

Shadows fall

 "But I felt them ... hungry shadows who knew my name, 

clawing at my mind and my soul to be let in."  

-- Peter S. Beagle, We Never Talk About My Brother

Self portrait 9-29-13

"Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever."

-- Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project

Self portrait (2) 9-29-13

"There was nothing the matter out there. 

It was in here, with me."

-- Cornell Woolrich,

Baker's Dozen: 13 Short Mystery Novels

Self portrait (3) 9-29-13

"This life is a shadowy thing, lad."

-- James Michael Pratt, The Lighthouse Keeper

Unfinished business

"In hell there is no other punishment 

than to begin over and over again 

the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime."

-- Andre Gide

Polymer clay mask 7-25-13

"I don't like the word 'experiment' in the context of art in general. 

It implies something immature, unfinished, 

something entertaining for a moment before it becomes irrelevant."

-- Abel Korzeniowski

Peg Boggs:   Oh, my. What happened to you?

Edward:      I'm not finished.

 

-- Edward Scissorhands

Typically a face has to be "finished" before I post it on the blog.

But sometimes I like to indulge in a process that takes a little longer than a day to complete, from start to finish.

Often, if I am waiting for such a process to take its time, I make other less time consuming faces simultaneously, post those, and wait for the time consuming one -- the lolly-gagger -- to be finished.

But today's face, even though I plan to do more to it, looked kind of cool in it's unfinished state. 

So I decided to share it, and some of my process.

For anyone who's interested.

This face is a mask -- a life-sized face -- made of polymer clay.

Usually when I make a mask this size, I use the clay as a mold only, and render the final mask from it in papier mache.

But this face  looked pretty cool in clay, and it had some details that I didn't want to lose in the papier mache.  Plus, I haven't ever made anything this big in polymer clay and I was in an experimental mood.

So I went ahead and baked it and made it permanent.

Here it is "raw," while the clay was still pliable and before I glued in the teeth.

Polymer clay mask (unbaked) 7-25-13

Polymer clay mask, baked, with teeth 7-25-13

And here it is "baked." With the teeth glued in.

While I was photographing it, it was getting dark, so I had work lights on. 

I dug how the light filtered through the mask highlighting and shadowing the different thicknesses of the clay. 

Also, it made this face look super-sinister. Which I also dug.  

It looked like this:

Polymer clay mask (2) 7-25-13

He looks pretty devilish, doesn't he? 

Or maybe she's a she.

 I haven't decided yet. 

Stay tuned.

To get the image at the top of the page, I used this same image, and just fiddled with the colors and contrasts, turned and tweaked a couple of knobs.

I plan to do more with this mask, but I enjoyed playing with it the way it is. 

It's a lot like raising kids.

You don't have to wait for them to grow up before you can enjoy them.

They're lots of fun at every age.

And its nice to take pictures to chart their progress along the way.

Also, just in case I fuck up this mask by doing more with it, I wanted to have a record of its existence while it was still pretty good.

Which is also a lot like raising kids.

Darkness and light

“... when an endless night seems to have fallen, 

hope can be found in the realization that

the companion of night is not another night, 

that the companion of night is day, 

that darkness always gives way to light ...”

-- Dean Koontz, Lightning

Self portrait 7-24-13

“So don't be frightened, dear friend, 

if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, 

casting its shadow over all you do. 

You must think that something is happening within you, 

and remember that life has not forgotten you;

it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. 

Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, 

since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?”

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 “It's part of what we call the Shadow, 

all the dark parts of us we can't face. 

It's the thing that, if we don't deal with it, 

eventually poisons our lives.”

-- Michael Gruber, The Good Son

 

“A shadow is never created in darkness. 

It is born of light. 

We can be blind to it and blinded by it. 

Our shadow asks us to look at what we don't want to see.” 

-- Terry Tempest Williams, 

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

Midnight Cowboy

"For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, 

and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

-- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist 

Midnight cowboy 6-8-13

"The lunar look skimmed scantly toe, breast, arm,

Then edged on slowly, slightly,
To shoulder, hand, face; till each austere form
Was blanched its whole length brightly.”

-- Thomas Hardy, "A Cathedral Facade at Midnight"

I scored another lucky jackpot at the thrift store -- a whole bunch of pose-able little action figure people, including:

1. a super-muscular wrestler with a really unattractive bowl haircut and weird embossed chest hair.
2. a bounty-hunter-ish dude with black gloves, cargo pants, a goatee, and handcuffs hooked on his belt.
3. a bridegroom in tux, bow tie and cummerbund, whose head is on a spring allowing it to recess, turtle-style, into his shoulders.
4. a paunchy gangster-y guy with a beer gut, a handful of papers and a black-stained pointer finger.
5. an orange wizard-y or maybe Zeus-ish guy with long, curly white hair and a white beard, wearing a purple toga and holding a handful of what might be thunderbolts? Or maybe protoplasm? 
6. and for today's face .... a li'l cowboy.

Except the cowboy's face isn't really there.
I mean, it's there in real life, but here it is rendered as just an empty, blank space.
Which forces the question ... if it's blank, is it still a face?

I am going to argue that yes, it is still a face, even if it is featureless.

I am going to argue that facial space without any features is still facial, and therefore still a face. Plus, the cowboy is wearing a hat, and his little ears stick out, which both imply a head, which implies that there has to be a face hidden there in the blankness somewhere, even if you can't actually see it.

For backup, I will rely on Dictionary.com, which defines a face as "the front part of the head, from the forehead to the chin."

So there.

Plus, it's my blog. So if I say it's a face, it's a face.

Feeling dazed and a little confused after yet another sleepless night, I feel a kind of kinship with this lonely li'l night wanderer, out there roaming around under the moonlight with only his shadow and the moon for company.

I can tell from his very blank expression and empty stare that he is a fellow insomniac who knows intimately the punishing, bone-deep fatigue and loneliness of long, wakeful nights, and who knows all too well how slow the night can go, and yet how quickly a morning is over.

I wish he could wander over to my house so we could talk about it.

If he could, I would give him fresh warm gingerbread.

I made some at 5 a.m. because I was still up.

Night comes creeping

“Fading light means more than just the end of another day. 

Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood.”

-- Jim Butcher, Turn Coat 

 

Self portrait with spider 6-6-13

“The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. 

It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep.

And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back,

riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry and exhausted from nightmares."

-- Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities

 

 

Self portrait with spider (2) 6-6-13

“You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. 

I wove my webs for you because I liked you. 

After all, what's a life, anyway? 

We're born, we live a little while, we die. 

A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. 

By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle.

Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.” 

-- E. B. White, Charlotte's Web  

Shadow play

"If you don't have any shadows you're not in the light."

-- Lady Gaga

Shadow face (polymer clay) 3-3-13

 Playing with light, dark, planes and angles.