Words from the Artist

It was 1998, I was a senoir in High School and it was a very cold day during winter break.  I went with a friend who was also an art student to New York City to visit some galleries.   As we were walking the streets, we passed a street vendor who had a table of  full of African Masks, I didn’t have so much money on me being a high school student the only one I could afford was  a simple thin mask. I think I spend after bargining with the guy maybe 7 or 8 dollars on it.  At the time I don’t think I knew why I wanted to buy it, but afterwards I began to research and look into the idea of “Masks.”  I asked myself many questions, “do they have meaning?” and “what can they be used for?”  At the time I was working part time as a ‘page’ in a Library (the guy or girl who puts the books away), so I ventured into the section about Masks, and I found many countries had Masks.  A few weeks later during the President’s Week vacation I took a bus upstate New York to Binghampton University to visit my brother who was attending school their, while he was studying in the library I was wandering around and found a huge exhibit of Masks.  I sat their for hours sketching them and reading about the meanings of each one.   I immediately incorporated Masks into my paintings.  One year later, I was shopping in a decorative discount store when I found a dozen or so similar Masks as the ones I had seen at the street vendor.   This time I had enough money to buy  many more and for the next couple of months I collected a few more.

I learned a few main things about masks. 1) they are meant to hide the person “Real” identity.  2) sometimes the face is not important it is our actions that matter. 3) People sometimes change by changing their masks but they don’t change who they are and sometimes they change who they are by changing their masks first. 4) When you first meet someone they are usually wearing a Mask, you have to wait to see what is behind it. 5) Masks represent ancestors and what they stood for.

Many of my paintings have masks in them or  sometimes the person does not have a face, this is similar to the idea of the Mask, because then the person has no identity they can be anyone.  I was 18-20 years old when I created most of the African Mask paintings, a time when most people are working out their own identity.  Most of the mask paintings are like self-portraits telling my story.

Copyright Jacob K. Mezrahi 2010