A Gathering of His Personae, 2013 - Present

I began this series of six drawings in 2013, but after several months, I put the project aside because, another project, The Artist and Model, was taking all my attention.

The term, ‘personae’ has a Latin and Greek root meaning ‘mask’. The idea that I am filled with a gallery of masks has many personal meanings. In particular, I am interested in the notion that we absorb ‘masks’ of other persons as we remember their influence on us.

I am intrigued by the idea of the personae, and the notion that each human has many. This is different from the concept of multiple personalities. I have always felt that many ‘masks’ reside within my psyche, from family to friends to mentors to historical persons I have admired – or not. Each of these ‘masks’ is a ‘reflection’ of the influence I have absorbed from each of them. In this sense, the persona is like knowledge or memory having a physical presence in the mind, possibly via the brain, a common notion among many cultures and psychologies.

In, A Gathering of His Personae, the many ‘masks’ that crowd my mind also crowd the space of these drawings.