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"Cubist Mask" As a child I thought I had no imagination. When other kids would look up at clouds and point out elephants, pigs, and horses, I would look up and see cumulus clouds. In that rare moment when it was so obvious a blind man could see it, I might see something else beside just clouds. What I came to understand later was that my imaginings were directed elsewhere and there is nothing wrong with seeing the world for what it is. When I opted to study art in college this lack of transference in my imagination-stunted creativity reduced me to something of a human camera. I could do creative writing. I could whistle a symphonic movement never before heard. I couldn't "visualize" to save my life. When it came time to do an exercise in "Cubism" in drawing class, I had no idea what my professor was challenging me to do. Cubism would be something like making a lot of paper cubes and joining them together to create a sculpture of a model or physical object, then doing a drawing of this sculpture where there are no curved planes in the drawing. I got that part of the exercise now, but back then I was drawing a blank and doing really bad art in the kindest manner of speaking. Cubism is well documented as an "art movement" within Western culture, but the deeper source of inspiration is lost to the (tribally-disenfranchised) civilized people who haven't been informed that the rest of humanity doesn't fragment reality into dysfunctional elements like the sacred and profane. The African tribal masks that inspired contemporary artists (to break down the subject matter into cubical elements) were depicting spiritual images of a very different nature than the Western Culture became concerned about with Cubism. I could intuit those tribal concerns much easier than I could visualize the abstraction from reality with Cubism. I'm aware of the spiritual elements associated with ceremonial objects, so I can say stuff like that. I finally did the math and got on with Cubism. It helped to do a sculpture first. That realist in me needed something physical to go by. So Cubist Mask isn't that steeped in Cubism. It is steeped in a long string of works named "masks" given my interest in theater, realism, and the hidden things behind the mask. It's a place to start. Maybe I named it Cubist Mask in honor of that effort to break away from realism and began to visualize images outside my physical reality. I remember it was almost painful to do this when I first got started doing art that required that I function as something other than a human camera. Oliver Loveday © 051211:11am EDT "Cubist Mask" On April 26, 2016, I began the task of doing a series of watercolor paintings based upon the sketches from the "Tunnel Vision Tapes". The process involved using charcoal to sketch out the lines from the pencil sketch. The goal is to get as close as I can to those original lines within a few minutes. Then I would go over the charcoal with an eraser to smudge and push the charcoal into the watercolor paper. After documenting the charcoal, I would take the painting outdoors and work on it with watercolor paint. The next day I would do a second session with each painting. Using the "dry brush" technique on the previous session would increase the luster, richness of the colors already down, and add more color to areas as needed. While the original sketches are not for sale, these works are available by credit card via PayPal. To see detail photographs of the paintings, click the photograph to go to the watercolor page it is presented on.
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"Cubist Mask"
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