Progress?

OK, progress. Now that the leather has dried for a couple of days, the "languettes" that held the leather onto the matrix are shaved down to paper-thinness with a very sharp blade, and the matrix is removed.
A stainless steel wire is glued around the inside perimeter and the languettes are then glued around it to hold it in place and hide it.



The languette dangling from the end of the nose is also shaved down (an excruciating process, with no margin for error); eyes are cut and the mask receives its base color of dye:


It still needs a patina layer over the dye, a mustache and eyebrows, and some varnish on the inside, but finally, it can be tried on... (psych, I don't have a photo of this! Sorry!)

Anyways, it doesn't fit.

The perimeter line of the forehead and temples is cut wrong, and the whole cavity of the eye socket needs to be cut deeper. The result is that the mask sits too far forward on my face, my actual eyes are more than an inch behind the eye holes, and the whole thing points downward slightly. So I will have to go back and work on the matrix some more. This is par for the course.

This particular piece of leather is kind of a mess; I didn't set the leather properly on the matrix to get the shape of the nose or eye sockets right, the tip of the nose is a mess, and there are lots of places where I scratched the leather with my fingernails or with various tools. So it's an acceptable first draft, and a good learning experience, but it's not a very good mask.

Yet.

A side note to those of you in Blue Lake...

...who might be reading this:

If you're studying mask design with Bruce, I would be extremely cautious about taking design advice from this blog. In fact, don't take design ideas from me at all. Stefano's work diverges in certain tricky, subtle ways from what we're taught at Dell'Arte and you'll be better served, right now, by listening to Bruce and the faculty around you. Know also that I think Stefano has serious doubts about the design of my mask, but that he's willing to let me try it and fail (or succeed, as the case may be.)

Thanks for listening.

Hammering and polishing

Today I had to return to the Atélier, negating what otherwise would have been a trip to the Louvre. But the leather on my matrix was wet, and it was left overnight to dry a little bit, but it needed to be hammered and polished before it dried out.



The first hammering is done with a sawed-off cow's horn, above. You use the tiny point to make small but intense craters in the leather. I think the idea is to crush the cellular structure of the leather, to release the substances within, and to compress it to make it thinner and denser. You have to hit it thousands of times, without leaving gaps. It's a workout for the forearm.

This is the phase where the leather is really stretched out over the form of the matrix, and the mask begins to take shape.

The next step is to use a plastic or resin hammer (not pictured) to beat down the ridges between the craters created in the first hammering. It is then of a more uniform thickness.

You then take the horn hammer again and, turning it over, rub the smooth curved surface of the horn over the leather in a process of polishing or shining. This is the weirdest, most mysterious, and most difficult part of the process: you can't just dig into the leather or you'll effectively just rough it up and scratch it. Instead, it's kind of like you're pushing the horn to a certain depth, where the internal substances are exposed and can be released. You then push the horn around at this depth to spread these substances around. And this somehow makes the leather shine:


The leather also darkens considerably in this phase, especially as you push the horn harder and deeper. Most of these color differences will disappear when the mask is tinted later on.

This is the final and most thorough stage of shaping, and where the leather really adapts itself to the structure of the matrix. You have to struggle to work the leather along each side of every protruding surfaces, to really push the edges into shape and make well-defined lines. And you have to dig very deep into the interior creases to get shine and definition there. The forehead wrinkles and naso-labial fold on this mask are the most difficult parts. The nose is not much fun, either.

At this stage, little remains to do on the structure of the mask except to remove it from the matrix and modify the tongues of leather (which are currently nailed into the wood) so that they can hold a wire and define the edge of the mask. But it needs to dry out some first. So I will leave it out in the air until Monday.

Leatherwork begins

This morning I did some final little edit-carving on the matrix, since I noticed last night, while updating this blog, that I had sanded off an important part of the brow—a major mistake, because the brow and forehead are where thoughts are conveyed. I was able to save the mistake somewhat, but it's far from ideal. Oh well. Tant pis.

Then we used the bandsaw to cut off the back, and define the curve of the mask edge. Here it is, sanded and coated with a substance to protect the wood from the moisture of wet leather:


And now it's time for leather. Here I begin by nailing the leather onto the matrix in the region of the eyes, smiling for the camera:


Getting the leather properly stretched around the nose took about 45 minutes, and it's a little crooked still (another thing I'll just have to live with this time). The long strip hanging from the nose will eventually cover the seam that now runs down the septum and over the lip.


And here's a goofy presentation of the end of the stretching stage, with a little bit of camera shake...


The mask now needs to sit overnight to dry out a bit before hammering. Tomorrow is all about hammering, shining, and finishing... and this Capitano will be ready for a test-drive!

For now, I am exhausted. I feel utterly brainless. All my mental energy, this week, went into producing this matrix. Time for a beer...

Et voilà...

I finished carving today, a day earlier than I expected to. Here he is:


After the chisels and gouges would give me no more detail, I used a set of rasps to smooth out the general surface and do detail work—especially on the forehead, the lip and the naso-labial fold. Then it was an hour and a half of sanding. Stefano's only comment was, "Well, we'll see how it plays as a mask. And if it doesn't work, you can put it on the wall and use it to hang your coat."

Total carve time: 35.5 hours. I may have to go back and re-carve some bits later, depending on how the leather looks.

So tomorrow we'll use a bandsaw to cut the back of the block away and provide the line that will make the edge of the mask. We'll treat the wood to protect it from moisture, and then work some leather onto it. Yohan is glad that it is not he who has to fit the leather around that nose!

Chipping.

Here's the wood as I left it overnight, with a new block glued onto the nose to provide the necessary length:


This new block eventually revealed a brutal knot and some fatal internal cracking, and had to be replaced with yet another block. After a sold 10 hours today, mostly spent on the nose, here is what the piece looks like now:


The nose is still too long, and is low relative to the eyes. It's also still too voluminous, relative to the rest of the face. Due to the lowness, I took off too much of the upper parts of the nostrils, and now I have a serious departure from the clay maquette. It will not be the same face that I made in clay—but I suppose that was pretty predictable, given that it's my first carving job. It may still play well as a mask. There are still a thousand things that could go wrong...

Sigh.

Ça vient...

... it's coming.

Thursday and Friday were spent learning how to hammer the leather onto the matrix, and then polish it (sorry, I don't have any pictures of this part of the process yet, as my hands were busy.) The polishing is one of the most mysterious and frustrating things I've ever learned how to do. Leather is a very complex substance, with an amazing 3-dimensional structure—different things happen at different depths when you hammer or rub it. It's like nothing I've ever worked with before. I don't have the work in my hands yet.

Stefano arrived in Paris Sunday night, and yesterday the atélier got down to serious business. He has several orders for masks from his inventory of matrices, and a few new masks to make. And he gave me some wood to start carving with:


And here I am making my very first cuts. Notice that I'm smiling.



The smiles would not last very long.

This is my first carving experience, and it's of course totally different from working with clay because there are no do-overs. You can't add anything. You can only subtract. So here's the same block of wood 5 1/2 hours later:


And that's where I left it at the end of the day yesterday. Note that the block was not quite the right size to fit the full nose; another piece of wood will be glued on to work the 3-4 cm of the tip.

The wood is starting to feel less foreign under my hands, the tools feel more like things I can articulate with. Stefano would not let me use any saws to cut away large areas; I had to use the gouges and chisels to chip, chip, chip away at the block until the form began to reveal itself. Later he gave me some big files which help immensely with rounding the surfaces of the head.

When I first arrived yesterday and Yohan and Carolina were introducing me, I told him that I had started a clay maquette and Yohan pulled the plastic bag off to show it to Stefano. And he looked at it, serious and a little startled, and we experienced two seconds of profound stillness—the only two seconds of such stillness in the entire time I've been in that room. He then hurried over and inspected it closely, then quickly walked away saying, "well, we are starting with something very difficult here." And then he seemed to forget all about it.

Later he gave me the wood and showed me the gouges; he said, "take the ones you need and get started."

Which ones did I need? I had no idea.

This is an atélier where a lot of students and young artists come for training, apprenticeships, internships. And Stefano is not afraid to to let us dive in and make mistakes. He criticizes Yohan for telling too much, and insists that we do it ourselves. I'm really grateful that he's letting me follow my vision on this Capitano; it might well be a disaster, but I'll learn a lot about wood and leather.

After a while the gouges themselves tell me which ones I need. The wood tells me. I can see or feel the surface I need to smooth; I can close my eyes and listen to the volumes in between my fingers.

I suspect it will take 50 matrices to feel comfortable with the wood—maybe 100—but I can feel it starting.

The most difficult thing so far has been trying to penetrate a lot of wood that I know I don't need, but not knowing how deep to dig. As you saw from the first photo above, I drew a profile of the clay onto the wood, but of course the profile lines only help when you're looking dead-on from the side. How do you find those slanted surfaces, those 3-dimensional curves from above? Where is that surface on the cheeks, or the nostril? It doesn't ever touch the lines of the drawing. Ultimately, you can't try to carve the lines, anyway, you have to find the surfaces, the volumes that make the facial features; the lines are merely the intersections of the surfaces. You can only use them as landmarks. If you try to carve them, you'll gouge out some volume that you probably needed.

For me, it's been generally a matter of working on one thing—say, the bridge of the nose—until I can't see or feel it anymore, or until I cannot work it anymore without knowing something else that comes near it—say, the eye socket. So I go work on that for a while. This I skip around over the whole thing until the disparate parts start to come together. The lip helps me find the nostrils, which inform the whole nose. The bridge of the nose determines the start of the forehead. The forehead swings over the eyes and meets the temple, which devolves into the cheek, which then show me the heretofore-invisible angle of the lip.

So here is the wood after four hours today, and again after eight hours:
The nose is still the least-refined part, obviously, but the rest has gained a lot of clarity. That's Stefano in the background, by the way. So: more progress tomorrow, I hope.

The apprenticeship begins!

Finally, after days of wandering around the streets—and insomniac nights, wandering around the inside of my skull—the internship started Monday.

I'm studying maskmaking in the atélier of Stefano Perrocco, a noted master of Commedia and carnaval masks. Stefano won't be here until later this week, but his two assistants, Yohan and Carolina, have taken me under their wing. Here's Yohan, working on an experimental Brighella/Larval mask.

I spoke with Stefano on the phone on Sunday, and he said he had to go to a conference in Poland, but that I should go to the atélier on Monday, someone would be there. That someone happened to be Yohan, who gave me a 1-minute tour of the workshop (including the wall of Stefano's matrices, right) then handed me a bag of clay, a plaster face positive and told me to get started! So I did. I wanted to make a classic Commedia type, since I'm working with one of the the tradition's best practitioners... my friends at Dell'Arte will not be surprised to hear that I just started with a big nose and went from there. Six hours later I had a well-begun Capitano.

For those of you unfamiliar with the process, in creating a leather Commedia mask, you start by making a clay model, as I've done here. Then you carve an exact-as-possible copy of the model out of wood (this is the tricky part); this copy is called a "matrix." You can then work the leather over the matrix, and make many different iterations of the mask. Il Capitano is a traditional stock character of which Yosemite Sam is a modern example.. He's agressive, arrogant, and often violent, though he frequently turns out to be a coward. He typically has a long, phallic nose that he brandishes like a sword, and a mustache; he's one of my favorite types to play. I'm including several photos here showing this mask's evolution; Yohan had some pointed observations about the early versions which have helped enormously. Classical Commedia masks are often quite stylized and have bizarre geometry (as you can see from two of Stefano's Capitano matrices in the background of these photos) but it is essential not to lose the human structure underneath. In the end, I have adopted some nearly planar surfaces on the cheeks, nose and brow as my stylizations, hoping that they don't obliterate the human volumes underneath. the mustache and eyebrows will be made of horsehair and added later. Here are four chronological verions of the mask:


Tuesday was Armistice Day, a national holiday here, so the atélier was closed, and I went to the Musée d'Orsay which by lovely coincidence has a major mask exhibition at the moment. It turns out that there are almost no theatrical masks in the show, but rather many sculptures and drawings by artists like Rodin and Picasso and others who used masks as an idea for sculpture and ornament. There were, however, some original drawings by Edward Gordon Craig of masks he'd designed for theatrical productions—crazy combinations of Commedia and Japanese Noh masks. Really cool. Outside the mask exhibit there were, among the many mind-blowing Post-Impressionists, some particularly mind-blowing Toulouse-Lautrec pieces. He kind of built his own Commedia universe, didn't he? Also on display are several original puppets from the Chat Noir Shadow Theatre, which were triply mind-blowing.

I've now been to the Orsay and the Centre Pompidou and already feel like I have to go back to both of them, when I had only budgeted one-day visits to each. What am I going to do about the Louvre?!?! I'm sure you all feel really bad for me.

Today, Wednesday, I finished my clay model—it's as good as it needs to be before starting on the wood—and Carolina started me on leather work. She and I will be producing a dozen or more masks off Stefano's matrices in the next four weeks. The clay, I'll note, was accomplished in 11 solid hours.

So for the last three hours of today, Carolina showed me how to soak the leather and fix it onto the matrix. Honestly, it's a lot like projecting a globe onto a two-dimensional map, only in this case you're adapting the two-dimesnional surface directly onto the terrain of the face. But the same laws of distortion and interruption apply! I'll leave you with a couple of pictures of Carolina working the leather into the creases on the matrix with a tool made from a cow's horn, and the brass nails—which don't oxidize and blacken the leather—fixing the leather onto the matrix. Tomorrow, we start the hammering...

Insomnia plus jetlag...

It's 6:27 am. I've been in Paris for 46 hours...

... most of which I've been nearly delirious, or dead asleep. Except at night.

I'm developing a hatred for the custom of traveling overnight. Normal people seem to be able to sleep on planes or buses but I cannot: I can barely sleep at home. Add the discomfort of a coach seat and the excitement of new geography, and it's impossible.

Still, I've managed to get out a bit and see my neighborhood here (the 12e arrondissement, near the Bois de Vincennes) and today/yesterday I walked from here to the centre, following the promenade plantée (a rehabilitated, elevated railroad bed) to the Place de la Bastille, over to Nôtre Dame, back and forth across the Seine, through the Jardin des Tuileries, and finally over to the Eiffel Tower, where I took a few pictures. Then, exhausted, I found a Metro station and straphung my way home. But now I can't sleep! Priceless.