state of mind
"Fortuna favours ignorance" tempera and oil on a 6 cm thick wooden box, 60 x 60 x 6 cm
How it started
Always the same, indifferent to the circumstances. "State of Mind" is a head, a person, that writes his/hers history.
The environments and people are copied from newsmagazines. One face is replaced with the face of " Stet of Mind". The people are involved in something, a strike, an act of love, shopping. With the simple method of dropping a stranger into various human situations you see the circumstances, as a stranger would, without the knowledge of the cultural codes. The individual "Stet of Mind" has no sex, age, or cultural belonging. She/he/it is free to interpret the situations as one should do for the very first time.
Inspirations: The film "Barry Lyndon" by Stanley Kubrick where Barry; the principal role, is trying to adopt to various circumstances. Or Alfred the figure from MAD magazine ,although in a humoristic way, is popping up everywhere with the same smile on his face.
I put a lot of effort to get the right facial expression, a balance between indifference and emapthy, seriousness and irony. To escape any decisiveness about this fake person this ambivalence was necessary. I modeled a clay head which I later took a cast of. I made a plasterhead and used it as a model that I could draw from to fit the human figure in the painting.