Ta-da!
These paintings are inspired by an acting exercise my actor friend described to me once on a random street encounter on his way to buy a clown nose at Ricky's costume shop. The exercise goes like this: a person puts on a clown nose and says "ta-da" until the audience/class feels that the performance is authentic. The "ta-da" might be repeated a hundred times, provoking frustration, exhaustion, and pure anger. The intention is to strip away the tendency towards a predetermined performance in order to invoke raw feelings and emotions. In other words, acting with emotional authenticity. This reminded me of blind contour drawing and the act of seeing versus what you think you see. From this seed, I sought to make a series of paintings about performance and authenticity.
I began a group of self portraits as the acting student with the clown nose. I used the blind contour method of drawing as a framework for the painting, and then built the painted image from observation, editing along the way to make sense of the parameters set by the drawing. The red nose establishes a context of performance (and clowning), and sets up a strong, sometimes annoying, visual marker to work with and against in terms of color and composition. In order to generate a spatial environment for the characters that emerged from this process, I expanded beyond self-portraiture to include interior spaces and film stills. The process became a game I played with myself, creating a structure for building characters, and a way to lose control over the end product of the painting.