I know the images in the painting. They have been with me since early childhood. As a result, I find what has been portrayed on its canvas to be very familiar. I also find that, because these images are so close, I cannot name them. They can only be alluded to. Are these images projections from the mask, or are they from the person behind it? My conclusion is that they are inseparable, that mask and human beingness are one, and that we are projections of our primal nature. The painting is very dark, a background of void out of which springs shafts and rounded areas of light and colors--aquamarines, purples, and pinks, among others. These are lines and colors that appeal to imagination rather than to perceptions of ordinary conscious experience. The canvas is layered very carefully. Some areas have coatings so thin that you can see the texture of the canvas material behind them. Other areas are densely covered with paint. There is even a chip so thick and jagged that it looks acrylic. All of this seems to lead to what looks like a very bright window in the upper right of the mask. This window draws to it the emotional intensity of the painting. What is on the other side of the window is the key. The key to what? I do not know. But it is as if one could look through this window one could archieve some fundamental knowledge of the nature of being. Wallance Stevens's phrase, "the image at its source," comes to mind. There is another possibility. Suppose we were to make it up to that window, look through and see...NOTHING. And that we have to unmask all of our primal images and experiences in order to find the essential emptiness which holds the universe and our human experience of it. Joe Liberto |
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