Mysterious Eyes You Can Take With You Anywhere!

Covid-19 has influenced the arts in profound ways. Now we have virtual concerts, virtual gallery tours of new artworks, and the ever present facial covering in most sculptures and paintings.

I started painting alluring female faces wearing masks in 2019 without anticipating that the pandemic would make everyone cover most of their face in public. In fact, street photography is now “eye photography in the street”!

So, in the past couple of months I have been painting women with masks as those who have seen my original work have asked for one to remember the pandemic, or at least 2020. The last one I did found a new home quickly as it was smaller than most of my paintings and could fit on any wall in an apartment.

So, decided to sculpt and paint a new one.

The starting “canvas” was a portion of hare pelt that I had rounded during preservation. Here is the furry side

And the preserved hide with the initial drawing of the eye and face contours:

I like a headpiece of rabbit tail or feathers on the women I paint, but I always start with black hairline as it will peek through any headpiece I come out with.

Next, the mask. I cut the thin lines of the peacock feather called herl. It is a tedious task to cut at different lengths to make a veil or face covering. The headpiece was simple and made of two cottontail fluffy tails.

 The jewelry came from an old bracelet I had kept for this kind of piecemeal usage. 

What is different in this project is my experimentation of the harmony between wood sculpting and hide painting such that none of the angles are covered. Indeed, compared to placing the painted pelt on a board or putting it under a frame, this one shows the fur and the hide without obstruction.

Here are the two pieces of dried desert “drift” wood and the hide canvas. I build the wood stand to accommodate the shape of the canvas perfectly.

Now, this women with the mysterious looks can find a place in any house as she is free of “wall dependency”!

August 29, 2020

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020