In Your Face

Painting of a nameless man
oil on canvas
sold

Quite a few years ago I saw the "fayum portraits" exhibit at the Metropolitian Museum of Art and was floored by the exquisite quality of the paintings/brushwork. I spent over two hours going back and forth examining them .

I have always been fascinated with the fact that once we are gone we become nothing more than the nameless mass of humanity that once existed. Oh we may exist in a piece of film, a photograph, but we are nameless faces. In flea markets there are sometimes boxes and boxes of old photographs of all these people, of aunts, uncles, wives, husbands, children. Their existence has been reduced to nothing more than a face on an old photograph. I just find it intriguing that we can look at a vintage photograph, or a painting that is thousands of years old of someone who once lived and breathed and ate and shat.