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November 25, 2004

Feeling emphatic

I’m feeling emphatic right now and it helps. It’s becoming unstuck, it’s getting out of gumption traps. To find yourself you have to change something, become somehow different. Sometimes this can be achieved by putting on a mask.

Wearing a mask you feel different, you get different reactions from your fellow passengers. Though the trouble is the mask is just that, a mask to hide something, not reveal something, the mask isn’t you.

To become truly emphatic, truly unstuck, you need to strip away something from yourself, strip away the accumulated masks that society demands you wear, and bare your vulnerable self, physically and actually.

People ask why I paint nude figures, and in particular nude, shaved, figures. I am trying to find the emphasis. I’m trying strip away the trappings of centuries of civilisation, and find the vulnerable, real, self underneath it all. I’m trying to emphasise the essence of what we are, that there is more to life than mobile phones, e-mail, tv and magazines.

Posted by john at November 25, 2004 10:47 AM

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