Skin / Deep

how our face (and the face of things) is far deeper than we think

Palimpsest: Élan Vital, ©Bruce Herman, 2021. Oil on wood panel with gold and silver leaf; 40” x 30”. Collection of Whitney Wedel Chapman

A palimpsest is the face an ancient page (parchment or vellum) that has been written on then scraped or abraded and reused—leaving ghost traces of the original text that often emerge hundreds of years later—the parchment having been chemically changed by the ink over time. The term also refers metaphorically to a landscape, or city, or work of art with visible layers of its own history-in-the-making among the ruins. A pentimento is the architectural equivalent of the same phenomenon—a residual element of a building that is preserved even as it has lost its original function—like the non-functional arches “buried” in walls all over Europe that remain as a kind of decoration or nod to the past.

My own process of making a painting almost always involves scraping and sanding (including drastic revisions) that almost obliterate previous layers of paint and painted image but where those vestiges re-emerge and contribute heavily to the final surface or skin of the painting. In that skin, that abraded and reworked surface, exists the real presence of the art—in much the way that we meet a person in their face. We never talk to someone’s hand or foot or back—only to their face. And that face is the deepest part of a person. It’s not their skeleton or internal organs that we seek, but their face.

The body exists for the face just as a stalk of a plant or its photosynthesis exists in order to produce the bloom.

I’ve found over the years that this vigorous making and un-making, losing-and-finding of an image in my studio work results in a richness that simply adding layers of paint cannot achieve. It’s almost as though the skin of the painting requires “history”: give and take/ finding and losing/working and reworking in order to come to life. In much the same way I’ve found that painting older people is much more interesting than painting a young person, no matter how beautiful or attractive they might be. An aging face reads like a book of life.

When we say something is “skin deep” we usually mean superficial or even inauthentic. We presuppose that depth is always associated with hidden meanings or philosophically complex ideas. But I’ve come to believe that the surface of things—the face and form—is where the real meaning dwells. The entire skin of the planet is festooned with endless varieties of flowers, colors, textures, oceans, and geological wonders. We don’t have to drill down to the subterranean caverns to find beauty. It is right here—at our fingertips—and that skin deep beauty is a sign of the meaningfulness of incarnation— “living in skin” to quote my friend singer-songwriter Jason Harrod in his wonderful eponymous album.

Another friend, Mako Fujimura, recently (last night) wrote a marvelous review of the new film “Rental Family” by the Japanese filmmaker Hikari—in which Mako meditates on the meaning of masks in his home culture and the relevance of all this to our social media culture. Comparing aspects of this tragicomic movie to the profound and tragic novel Silence by Shūsaku Endō, Fujimura speaks about the necessity of facing our own inner lives which are often at a variance with our skin, our face, our social masks. He also emphasizes that the Japanese culture of masking has been a means of sustaining deeply held convictions amidst a culture of suppression. Our current global culture of radical autonomy can ironically also suppress and deny deep faith conviction by its million and one surface distractions. We can learn from traditional Japanese Noh theater, he says, that depth of feeling is not always expressed most completely in anguished or jolly facial expressions—but in this stylized and profoundly restrained art form that captures and delivers great emotion.

In Psalm 27, the poet-king David says,

“When You said, ‘Seek My face,’ my heart said to You, ‘Your face, O Lord, I shall seek.’ Do not hide Your face from me!”

There are hidden depths in the surface of things—and our faces (and the face of our planet) carry the vestiges, the record of our life experience. Our faces are palimpsests of our very selves and we live into those faces when we manage to become unguarded and vulnerable. It might even be said that an aged face, full of wrinkles and obvious losses and griefs, is the more beautiful face.

Osamu (portrait of Mako Fujimura’s father), ©Bruce Herman, 2018. Oil on panel with gold leaf; 30” x 30”