Surrounding a human eye with thousands of dried leaves, I was struck by the idea for the project: “make face with leaves.”
Before I embark on a new project, I always research work done by other artists. I came across the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an Italian Renaissance painter known for creating composite heads made of fruits and vegetables. This was a big disappointment. Someone, somewhere had already thought of this and had executed his idea magnificently.
De Musset said that “Perfection does not exist”. If it did, improving upon it would be impossible. Art, just like science, is incremental. Art is pushing the boundaries of our understanding. It’s the act of creating something novel. It’s breaking a world record. It’s discovery.
While my art pays homage to a long tradition in art history, it is mostly concerned with the exploration of Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to living and non-living things, and Pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon where we perceive familiar patterns, especially faces, where none exist. Magritte famously said “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, equally one could say “This is not a face”, and yet our powers of abstraction, a power that is uniquely human, allow us to see a face. My art hijacks the cognitive processes in your brain to not only make you think that you are seeing a face, but that you are seeing a being with real emotions. The Arcimboldo Series brings a fantasy back to life.
