Face, Second Phase, Third Phase

For my second face on that huge piece of paper, I wanted to expand on the theme of eyes closed.

No, not eyes wide shut as in that steamy movie, but something more cerebral.

For some reason, Buddhism came into mind.  I wanted to paint the attainment of Arhat.  Such state encompasses ridding of all thoughts, worries,pain, matters of life and death, and removed from all worldly  burdens.

For this face, I chose to do something a little different.  I wanted to paint it with reversed values.  I needed it to resemble a photo film negative.

I began by sketching the basic construct with very light ink.

I then worked on building up the values, black is white, white is black

Finally all the values are in

The original sketch showed slits for the eyes, where eyeballs would reside.  In this negative rendition, I intentionally left out the eyeballs.

The interesting thing is, to me anyways, that after I looked at the picture for a while, my brain seemed to work overtime and started to fill in the blanks and the image no longer resembled a film negative anymore.  It started a life of its own.  The fact that it had no eyeballs was not relevant anymore, nor was it evident. In fact it seemed like Arhat had his eyes closed also.  The eyeballs were just surreptitiously missing.

I did the face in this fashion because I had a statement to make, which I will delve into more deeply in the future.  The gist was I wanted the negative image to be a contrast with the rest of the faces.  I imagined that the audience would  sense the disharmony  but they probably couldn't tell right away.  In fact I was hoping this divergence would create a certain level of discomfort or apprehension but one was not able to attribute to the source.

For the third face I chose a figure from the Buddhist theme again

here is the painting with all the faces

At this point I really am not sure what my next step should be.  My intention is to call this quits; before I do something stupid.