MASKS:
Mask making is almost meditation for me. it is a way for me to form my dreams and my fantasy into physical form. Most of the masks I have made so far were inspired by images I remembered from dreams, or quickly sketched out upon waking after dreaming. I like that, because I have always had the most bizarre dreams, and I used to wish that I could surround myself in them while I was awake.
I usually begin with some serious notion of making a mask ‘just so’, but quickly loose myself in a creative trance…and whatever the end result is comes out without too much conscious input.
I usually scrape the bottom of the local flea market for scraps of fur, for horsetail, feathers, old horns, and other antique stuff that gets left behind in the markets. Once in a while I get leather or dyed wool from the scrap bin at the local leather shop. Modeling mass and paints I get from the local art supply shop, paper mache I make of old newspapers and glue.
I don’t think that my masks are as wild as I want them to be yet. I still, in the few moments when I step away from them to plan a bit, find myself trying to make them ‘pretty’. There’s nothing wrong with the occasional inspired ‘pretty’ mask, but ‘pretty’ as a notion is about as shallow and insubstantial as you can get. I think that my next series will be a beautiful group of chillingly un-lovely spiked toads.
What is a spiked-toad? Well, just the other night while I was fast asleep, I was running barefoot in the night down an abandoned highway that was submerged beneath several inches of brackish red water. Suddenly I realized that the water was full of thousands of softball sized broad headed toads with five inch spikes all over their faces and bodies. When they inhaled they doubled in size, and when they exhaled they made the sound of a tight fat rubber band being plucked with great force, then collapsed again to the size of spiky soft balls. For miles of highway, they were all facing me and burping out their rubbery “gurps”. I was running too fast, almost flying over the surface of the water. I was afraid that I would crush the toads beneath my feet but I couldn’t slow down. Suddenly I felt like I was trapped in some break dance ritual, trying in shattered fragments of seconds to place a foot just so on the watery asphalt whipping by beneath my feet. The harder I concentrated, the faster and more out-of-control I flew. Somehow, through some wonder, I managed to run the entire length of the dream without stepping on a single toad. I woke up sweaty and exhausted with my heart punching up at the under side of my ribs, but with no stringy bits of dream-time frog guts clinging between my toes. Very inspiring!
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