Wrapping it up

And here is the first fully-finished version of my Capitano.

The last steps in the process were adding the hair, which in this case is from an unshorn sheepskin, and adding a layer of shoe wax to set the dye color and protect the leather. A small amount of a special kind of tar is added to the wax to create a tiny bit of texture and patina.

Stefano is leaving Paris tomorrow for Marseille and later Venice, where he will deliver this particular mask to my teacher Giovanni Fusetti, as a gift to thank him for his help in securing this internship and for the enormous role he played in my training at Dell'Arte.

So, today was supposed to be my last day in the atélier. But as I was working on this mask, a frequent client of Stefano's arrived looking for a mask for one of his students to use in a fencing scene. And he became fixated on my mask! So, while I was intending to spend Monday and Tuesday at the Louvre, I will instead return to the atélier (Yohan will be there) to put out one more copy of the mask. Maybe the guy will buy it! If not, it will stay with Stefano as a gift. It's an extremely gratifying way to end the internship.

I fly to LA on Wednesday. Tomorrow I will do my last stroll through the streets of Paris, since I haven't been to Montmartre yet. Which means: no Louvre! (it's apparently an absolute nightmare on Sundays.) I was also hoping to squeeze in a trip to Chartres to see the cathedral there, but that and the Mona Lisa will have to wait until my next trip here. Tant pis.

This evening I went with Stefano and Yohan to a meeting of the Société des Createurs des Masques, a new organization of prominent Paris maskmakers who are collaborating to promote their work. The organization includes Jean-Marie Binoche and Erhard Stiefel, who makes masks for Ariane Mnouchkine (neither of them were at the meeting, however.) The group has launched a fascinating project: they're all creating a mask for the character of Richard III, and in May will present the masks (and in most cases, an actor playing the mask) to each other and to the public. The point is to demonstrate different interpretations of the character and different techniques (leather, wood, resin, papier-maché) for making masks. It's a pretty cool idea. Wish I could be here to see it...

The way leather moves

Carvings from Melanesia:

A contemporary painting from Papua New Guinea:


See the bottom of this post for context.


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Sorry it's been so long since my last post; there hasn't been much to report.

Since I finished the major carving on my matrix, I've been steadily working the leather onto it and making adjustments to it; but the process is spread out over a few days (because the leather needs two nights to dry between the various phases) and you can only do so much at one time. So I've been working with the assistants and the other intern to simply fill out Stefano's orders for other masks. This just means doing whatever needs to be done: posing the leather on a matrix; hammering and polishing it; cutting the languettes and setting the wire. Collectively we've produced 15-20 masks in the last week or so.

It's good to spend these last two weeks just working on leather. I take breaks now and again to look at Stefano's matrices—their designs—or to observe Stefano and the others as they work on particular aspects of the craft. But it's good just to work the leather and feel how it moves under my hands, through all the different phases of the work. How different pieces of leather feel and react to the work. The density and texture that vary within an individual piece. How it changes as it dries. How some pieces polish quickly and smoothly and others take a lot more work—or finesse.

I make a lot of mistakes, but there is constant improvement. I wish I had more time here to learn about the special cases that require particular skills: Dottore masks require a very precise cut in the region of the eye, or you won't be able to set the wire; Neutral masks have to be hammered and polished so that no hammer marks are ultimately visible, because they won't have dye to hide the marks and they require, aesthetically, an absolute smoothness. These are things I've merely been told—they won't let a rookie like me make my mistakes on those masks. I will have to actually learn them for myself later.

I spent Saturday evening and most of Sunday at the Musée du Quai Branly, which is the national museum of ethnography, and contains much of Claude Lévi-Strauss's personal collection of masks and other artifacts. It's a controversial museum; the extreme postmodern architecture is pretty bizarre right next to the Eiffel Tower, and they've made some bold (if problematic) choices in terms of how you approach the artworks. Here's a link to their official "map":

http://www.quaibranly.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/plans/PLAN-RECTO-Anglais.pdf

It's certainly a more organic approach than the Classical museum architecture of, say, most American Natural History museums, and it's one that makes you get up close to the artwork. You have to go on this long 'journey' up a white ramp to get to the main collections, and there the walls are either black and invisible or sort of shapeless and beige, as if they're made out of mud. Most of the artwork is dimly lit, with very directional light. I suppose they want us to have the feeling that we are archaeologists or anthropologists ourselves. But half the time, you can't see all of the work, which becomes utterly maddening, and the whole thing actually has the effect of exoticizing the art and mystifying it, which feels like we haven't gotten over the whole "colonial" thing yet. It's pretty awkward.

But, oh my God—the artwork...

I was literally transfixed by the first things I came across: carvings and masks from Melanesia, a culture I know nothing about. The whole Oceania exhibit is astounding, and they have the biggest collection of Australian Aboriginal art I've ever seen. This consists of an enormous collection of traditional/antique stuff, but also a lot of contemporary art drawing on those traditions. There is also a big special exhibit of work by artists from Papua New Guinea of traditional themes and styles, bud painted with acrylics on canvas. Totally mind-blowing. There's one small room that is utterly filled with giant Orthodox iconography frescoes from Ethiopia, which is probably where I left my brain on Saturday night. There are enormous sections on Africa and the Americas, but honestly I couldn't handle it at that point, and I'm more familiar with that stuff anyway. So I sadly skimmed it. Sunday, I went back for the special exhibits (one on Japanese Modernism, the other of carvings and masks from the Arctic cultures of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia. Mindblowing. Mindblowing. Both of them. Then I went back upstairs to revisit the stuff I'd seen the night before.

The masks they have here are both totally different and practically identical to what I'm studying with Stefano; the Commedia and Carnaval traditions stretch way back through Rome and Greece to European prehistory. Of course, most of that history is just as unwritten in Italy as it is in Melanesia. As stultifying, rationalized western Realism conquers the globe, it's heartening to be able to touch the low-tech magic of masks and think that I have a chance of using them to illuminate modern existence.