Statement by Art Paul What my heads are saying…

People carry their lives on their faces. We all look to faces for clues about people, though we all wear masks and harbor various selves. And your masks will never face you. You can look in a mirror but when you do the mirror flops your image, so it’s wrong right off. Perhaps this sort of uncertainty explains my obsession with faces, with heads.

My heads are very often in layers, masks over masks, demonstrating an inner life and our many, various, rarely-seen selves, which explode before me as I draw them, my pen chasing the pieces. I see the face as an architecture grown from its surroundings and discovered with a microscope.

People, especially art writers, ask if my heads are essentially all self-portraits since I rarely use models, if my heads are then a product of my subconscious. There is some logic to that. We all carry our lives on our faces, and I use the face as a metaphor to translate my concerns with relationships, with my own and others’ inner lives, and with the awesome, troubling human condition.

By: Lanny Silverman, Curator of the Exhibit of that name at the Chicago Cultural Center

The face is capable of imparting a vast array of information, and our crucial ability to decipher meaning from physiognomy begins as early as infancy. Paul’s ongoing series, “Heads” offers a myriad of variations … all hinting at many beings within oneself.

This artist’s wealth of professional experience as a graphic designer is apparent, yet often “played off against” and ultimately transcended. Formally these drawings offer a wide variety of styles and techniques. “Tighter” illustrative means are at times abandoned for a looser, more painterly approach. Modernist influences as diverse as German Expressionism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism are often evident. Color usage varies from being subtle and closely modulated to an intense, frenzied application… Materials vary as well, with a range of application.

Excerpt from Gerald Nordland’s essay on Art Paul’s “Heads” series

(Nordland, an art critic, is the founder of the California Institute of the Arts, former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum, and has written books on artists such as Gaston Lachaise and Richard Diebenkorn):

Art Paul’s drawings and paintings of human heads… reveal his compassion for individuals, his commitment to social issues, a sensitivity to human limitations and suffering, and an empathy for the troubled, the fearful, and the defensive in all of us. The drawings abound in references to personal values, satirical observation, and social commentary… animated by … objectivity, fairness and generosity. Because Art Paul tends to question conventional wisdom… his own work is consistent with the avant-garde testing of limits and values of internationally admired artists he has employed, such as Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Andy Warhol, and Salvador Dali…

He knows art and literature are crowded with faces and stories about faces — Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Poe’s Oval Portrait, Gogol’s The Portrait. The Swiss Painter Paul Klee claimed “my human faces are truer than real ones.” Art Paul is enchanted by beautiful, near-perfect faces; intrigued by unusual or even grotesque faces, as were Da Vinci, Mantegna, Daumier and Ensor, who searched for the unusual in the street…Art Paul has intently observed the human parade… His drawings are about the human condition, not really portraits, but inventions, which correspond with our common experiences. As Baudelaire says, “all good and true draughtsmen draw from the image imprinted on their brains and not from nature.”

Excerpt from Art Paul: Inner Faces