Ninety Masks

Watercolour Heads
watercolour on paper
36.5 x 26.5cm
1981

Francesca and Massimo Valsecchi Collection, Palazzo Butera, Palermo. Photo by Marco Cassina

These words are taken from the artist's statement

Science has recently told us that a particular area of the brain specialises in construing human faces, separating them from other aspects of the visual world. A template for such recognition is it seems already present in the newly born.

Makers of masks in different societies have intuited this throughout history as witness the multifarious stylisations and schema of the human face seen in ethnographic museums.

This drawing aims to make a similar vocabulary for imagined ritual use in our own culture. I have employed a constant formulaic module and a restricted repertoire of masks in ninety attempts to capture character mood or expression. 

Other drawings in this series have been based on these more successful hieroglyphs which inhabit a world somewhere between Lavater’s Physiognomy , pictograms from archaic cultures and current corporate logos.