Masked

What’s behind the mask? When my daughter was five years old, she loved doing my wax figures’ hair. After I made this figure, she took it and twisted its pink hair, pulling it down across the face. It was such a completely innocent act, something a five-year-old might do simply because she thought it looked funny or pretty or interesting. There was no deeper meaning attached to it. Just a child playing with a strange little figure her mother had made. And it was sweet.

When I began the painting, I expected that feeling to stay with it all the way through the process. I imagined the finished piece would somehow preserve that little moment of childhood innocence. It didn't. Once I began developing the shadows, the figure changed completely. The pink hair across the face became something more like a mask. The shadows gave the figure a darker, more mysterious presence, and suddenly I was looking at something I hadn't intended to make at all. Or perhaps something I hadn't known I was making. The face is partially hidden and that immediately raises questions. What is behind the mask? Is she hiding? Protecting herself? Playing a role? Has something changed? And, inevitably, I started thinking about innocence. Does it disappear as we grow up? Do we lose something when we become more aware of the world around us? Or does that childhood self remain somewhere underneath everything we've accumulated since? I don't think innocence is necessarily lost. Maybe it just gets covered up.

The interesting thing about this painting is that the darkness wasn't in the original gesture. It emerged through the process of painting. My daughter created the pose. I created the shadows. Somewhere between the two, the figure became something more complicated. And I like that.

The painting doesn't resolve the question of what is behind the mask. It leaves the figure suspended between childhood and something darker, between hiding and revealing, between who we are and what we allow the world to see.

But underneath it all is still that five-year-old's simple act of playing with pink hair.