Persona

In my work while creating the animals in the Seven Sacred Sins series, I felt that the medium of image transfer could be also be used in creating strong portraits of some of the Asian men I had photographed. As it was, I was right. The mysterious qualities distressed medium lent itself well to portraits, and in some cases of the human body. The pieces are all painted and transferred onto plywood, reminding me of an era of woodcutting as precious as the self portraits by Albrecht Dürer, but by no means as accomplished nor refined.

Portraits to me are very difficult to photograph. They should translate beyond the facade and into the depths of the soul, the inner voice of the person. Yet we all have something unique for each of us, which is conveyed physically through the constructs of the human body, face and the environment that surrounding the individual. This package becomes our persona, the manifestations of the non-material into form and structure, as without it, we are nothing (or ‘no-thing’).