The reason why this painting is along the lines of my Masks of Human Emotion theme is because this is what it often times looks like when the masks are taken off. Even in America’s liberal culture of expressing oneself freely, I’d say that people still have a multitude of masks given to them by the various institutions of our times. I suppose etiquette is one word that succinctly describes broad swaths of what I’m getting at here.
Etiquette is a sort of governing order that keeps groups of people in harmony and in line with the group’s interactivity. While individuals within the group may not agree with one another on one topic or another, everyone generally stays within the boundaries of what is socially acceptable to talk about and discuss. It’s usually a fear of criticism and rejection that keeps individuals within the boundaries of what a group’s social etiquette has delineated as an unwritten standard.
Large portions of a person’s character, identity, and creativity often get suppressed in the name of stability, harmony, and collective continuity, regardless of how rotten that collective state may be when heavily invested in groups. Groups range from kids who like the same music, to families attending a certain church, to political parties, all the way to extreme cult groups.
While groups, in themselves, aren’t necessarily harmful, they do require certain portions of human expression and emotion to be suppressed in favor of other expressions and emotions. If a person can detach from any sort of group with relative ease so as to reflect and express the suppressed feelings on one’s own, then all is well. The group can even be healthy.
It is when a group dominates, and takes over a person’s identity that the group becomes unhealthy in my opinion. What happens with the emotions, thoughts and feelings that don’t fit in with the group’s standards is that they become antithetical, not okay, and polarized into an unconscious state. They don’t go away either. In fact they build. Their energies are only allowed expression through the filters of a group’s standards.
This painting gives a visual description of a few of the underground emotions and feelings lurking behind the masks we have crafted for society, and that society has crafted for us. It is also reminiscent of when I used to be a landscaping supervisor at Loving Homes Greens in Riverside, California. I used to train and manage young men who elites would define as the lower classes of society. There was much drama involved in this, and many things were expressed out in the fields on hot Summer days that society normally suppresses in order to fit in and be pleasing to the managerial classes of society.
Art of eVan 