Skip to main content

Dance Masks

20" x 16", oil on wood panel, 2014, private collection

With my current World War One project I'm now slowly developing some more conceptual pieces, moving into metaphor, allegory, and other weirdness, expressing my own opinions, thoughts and feelings. This is an art project, after all, and not a book report.

This painting references chemical warfare, and its large and particularly nasty role in WWI. Read about the horrors here. This painting also references a nightmare I've had since childhood...

I was probably eight or nine years old (but I can't be sure at all) and I was watching whatever kids' program on television I would have been watching normally at that time, when a commercial came on for one of those compilation records (featuring the greatest hits of this musician or that), and this one was for 1940s-era big band music.

Fine. No problem.

But among the black and white film clips of the era (big bands, people dancing, having fun, enjoying themselves, etc.), there was a fleeting shot of a room of soldiers dancing with women (at a dance during R&R?) and everyone was wearing gas masks.

And it terrified me.

My mind couldn't really makes sense of seeing men and women doing a seemingly joyous thing like dancing while wearing bags on their heads with two round and creepy windows to see out of. And that breather thing by their mouths. It was so surreal my little mind nearly short-circuited...kind of like catching that glimpse of that couple in "The Shining" (you know, one of the is in a weird bear costume and...it's creepy); what business did they have showing that in the middle of the day during a kids' show? I wasn't angry, but kind of shocked and confused and that image has haunted me all my life. Unfortunately, painting this nightmare* hasn't robbed it of any of its power; I still find this image incredibly unsettling.



*I didn't actually have nightmares about this, but I feel the term applies, nonetheless.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi
5 comments
Read more

City of Angels

17" x 11", watercolour and digital, 1999 Ah, City of Angels . I thought I was getting cool film noir but got a cheesy musical instead (Google it if you must). Still, it was fun to make the poster and associated images, mostly because the research consisted of watching real films noir and buying a great book on movie posters of the genre. I made tons of sketches and a few digital mock-ups. For the final poster above, I made three separate watercolour paintings (one of the couple and one each of the two black and white heads) and composited them in Photoshop, where I also added the text. In true movie poster fashion, I wanted the actors names to be the top two names, but I lost that battle and had to use the characters' names instead. It looks fine, but it implies that "Kingsley and Stone" are the lead actors in the show. Oh, well...it's only community theatre... By making the "angel" above half black and white and half colour, th
Post a Comment
Read more

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co
2 comments
Read more