The Face I Knew Before I was Born

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The Face I Knew Before I was Born
On October 24, 1987 I had a dream in which two very talented Northern California Native American artists, whose lectures I had heard earlier that same evening at the Mendocino Art Center, each presented me with an object. Each object represented the “Face I Knew Before I was Born.”
It has been observed that newborn humans spend more time looking at images that suggest the human face than at other random kinds of images.  I think this is because we are hard-wired to recognize human faces for survival purposes.  To “recognize” literally means “to know again.”  For us to know something again as newborns, means we had to know it before we were born.
For quite some time I had been very curious what this face-we-humans-know-before-we-are-born, this facial likeness that is hard-wired into our brains actually looks like. After the dream, I spent a few days doing drawings in an effort to capture what I had seen and been given in the dream.
The first few drawings in this series show my effort to find that image. The last image is a photograph of a pair of sculptures I finally made representing the “faces” I had received respectively from each of the two artists in the dream. They are painted on cutouts of old 1-inch thick redwood planks, each measures approximately 12″ x 12.” I gave them a coat of white gesso then a base texture that was created with gray acrylic paints in a variety of values. Lastly, their “features” were added with black and grays, and their “hair,” which is comprised of bent and rusted nails I had collected over the years, completed the feeling of the images I had been shown in the dream.
This pair of low-relief sculptures hung in the NadaFarm Museum of Archetypes from 1988 to 2016 when they were removed to protect them from the now-decaying structure in which they were displayed. They now hang side-by-side above a closet in my current studio. To view them, I just have to turn my head slightly to the East while sitting at my computer workstation. They are a real comfort to see whenever I happen to look in their direction.
To scroll through the four images in this small gallery, click on any one of the small images below. Next click on one of the large arrows that will appear on either side of your screen. Click on either arrow to view the gallery.