(Another abbreviated extract from my Faces in the Crowd document which was published in 2017. The last paragraph is new!)
… As I was looking at the crowds of people around me in the streets a thought crossed my mind. I should do some portraits of the Chinese people in order to get to know them – even if it is just visually – for my own sake, because I felt so cold towards my “hosts” simply because I could not communicate with them. Life around me and its people were a complete mystery – even though the environment was picture perfect. I took my camera and I tried to aim it rather unobtrusively at the crowds a few times and I took a few shots. At home I zoomed in and I chose 10 faces I liked and I started the portrait process. Obviously when one zooms in on faces in a crowd distortion takes place and you end up with a rather vague pixelated image of a person who has become anonymous. I decided to call this collection of works: Faces in the Crowd.
I embarked on a rather tedious method of portraiture which I used very successfully – I believe – in Saudi Arabia, but little did I know the humidity would jeopardize my best intentions. I bought the A3 canvases, the gesso, the spout bottles and a few tubes of dark oil colour. I started the process, which under normal conditions would only take about 6 weeks for stage one to be finalized, but this time it turned out that after 3 months I still had to wait for the paint to dry and stage one would drag on for longer… To be honest, these Faces in the Crowd portraits had become a little like the Ghosts in my Head, but my work stared me in the face and it was time to continue with the process and to bring the struggle to a close. I completed the faces as best I could, without disturbing them too much.
My preferred techniques failed, so I had to make some other plans. I decided I would give the faces a crude expressionistic feel, because that was the only way I could imagine them, otherwise I would have to disturb them too much and I would overwork them.
Being an Art teacher, one is very quick to tell the students to dig deeper, so it was my turn to dig deeper in an attempt to reach a level of “something” I was not sure of. I took close-ups of the faces and then I reworked them digitally. I enhanced the colours and intensified the contrasts and eventually a kind of Pop Art portrait emerged that was very two dimensional and simply beautifully flat, but I liked it… The next step inevitably had to be collage, because I wanted to cut and manipulate these people whom I grabbed randomly from the crowds and I wanted to re-contextualize them in an environment I had control over and create some kind of a “Happiness Factory” atmosphere…
I think in my head I felt I was becoming Henri Matisse who used patterns so well with his fauvist approach. Another artist whose work I admired from afar, before I moved to Asia, was the Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami. If you look at his work, you will see a decorative playfulness and after I had arrived in China, I realized that the abundance of printed matter and Walt Disney elements you see around you daily would inevitably trigger that response in any artist.
Let me return to my search for patterns which are abundantly available when you look at wrapping paper, which is precisely what I bought… and when I used the animated cartoon-style stickers here I felt as if I was finally able to express my “other-worldly” surrealistic impressions of the Chinese scenes I encountered daily, where these movie or cartoon images pop up at unexpected junctions, be it on a t-shirt or a helium balloon that a happy child has on a string.
This collage journey of forty pieces helped me to make a connection with my Chinese reality and it brought me a measure of inner stability and I felt it brought me closer to the people . I cannot guarantee that creating collages would be beneficial for other artists in transition, but the creative process allowed me time for contemplation to deal with many unspoken issues in my mind, I believe. Sometimes we need to cut up a few things in order to create a new composition that will help us to whistle a happier tune. (Unpack and repack?)