Screenprinting, Drawing
2010
EMOTISCAPES is a series of portraits and mixed portraits inspired by Charles Darwin’s The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Through the opposing approaches of gesticulation and delineation the artist has absorbed from America and Japan, he strives in the first half of the project to capture the power of the fleeting emotion and in contrast intricately map out and break down the resulting features. These "archetypes" aim to challenge the traditional ideals of portraiture in the depiction of the subject and in the frame, which is brought into the composition and realized through taping necessary to the screenprinting process.
In the second half of the project, the screens from the archetypes are printed over each other in a partially uncontrolled way, allowing a new series of possible emotional expressions to be discovered.
ARCHETYPES
Each "archetype" strives to flesh out a different one of Darwin’s profiles of human emotional expression with its own unique touch, color, and composition.
Determination
Anger
Anxiety
Astonishment
Disgust
Grief
High Spirits
Horror
Suffering
Pride
MIXED EMOTIONS
The portraits being the same size & format, once the screens were developed for the original "archetype" pieces they were able to be combined in a variety of ways to produce a second series of "mixed emotions".
These pieces have an unexpected ghostly quality, an uncanny mix of recognizable expressions that have been broken down and put back together in unnatural combinations of familiar elements.
DRAWINGS
EXHIBITION
