|
My inspiration
for this piece was a poem by Paul Laurence
Dunbar called "We Wear the
Mask." When I first read this poem,
it was really powerful and I had lots of images come to mind. In
class we
started talking about how the white people wanted to see the black
culture, but
only wanted to experience the good things about it. This got me
to
thinking and connecting back to the poem. It is saying that
African-Americans hide all the sorrows and “bad things” behind a mask
that is
grinning.
I am not
the most artistic person and when this project came up I had no idea
how I was
going to present my idea. Somehow I came
up with the idea of silhouettes and how simple, yet effective they are
in
getting across images and meaning. The
idea of the plexiglass to cover the “bad” things came from my middle
school
years. Back then I used to do a lot of
my art on or with plexiglas and I always liked the effect it had on art.
To me, it seems to make things more clean-cut
and to “pop out.”
The theme
of my art piece is hiding all the sorrows and hardships of
African-Americans in
the 1920s-30s behind a mask of “…grins and lies…” They did this because
the
whites only wanted to see the fun aspect of the African-American
culture and
keep the rest hidden. So that is what
the blacks did.
To create
this piece of art gook a lot of thinking.
Before any one step I had to talk it over and each step was changed a
lot from my original idea. I started out by drawing out designs for the
silhouettes and then cut them out. I
realized that some of them, like the hands, needed some definition, so
I
decided to shade them with white pencil, and that helped the shapes to
take a more
definite form. After the cut-outs were
done, I painted the mask and thought that it needed to stand out more,
so I
painted flames around it. I then took
the “bad” images and put them under the plexiglas (as if they were
hiding). I put the “good” things on top
of the glass and then glued the mask on.
After that was done, I felt like the poem needed to be incorporated, so
I cut up the lines of the poem and randomly placed them on the piece.
-Alison O’Leary
|
