Masks and snow

The villa has spent most of the day in a dark, cold rain only one step removed from sleet. There's snow in the hills nearby. The radiators are doing their best, but heat is state-rationed in Italy, so everyone's hunkering down in multiple layers of sweats and scarves.

Today we started our mask-making intensive with Lino. Each of us has chosen one commedia mask to make; from this mold we'll each pull one copy for future students of the Accademia and one for ourselves.

Everyone starts by smearing clay on a plaster or cement positive. The Accademia has a number of cement positives in varying sizes and shapes, and most students are working with positives that approximate their own faces. Zach and I, since we had molds taken for The Persians, are working with those positives. It's a disconcerting, alienating experience to sculpt upon your own features. If the masks weren't grotesques, I think I'd be tempted to correct certain aspects of my face.

It's been years since I've worked in an art studio, and I didn't realize how much I missed it. The visual and plastic arts have always been able to take me to a place of happy calm akin to a runner's high or the mental state immediately after yogic meditation. Working with clay, in particular, is so immediate and tactile that you can almost bypass your brain and let your eyes and hands do all the work. (Lino says, in fact, that the eyes are the more important factor: being able to observe matters more than being able to work with your hands.) It's especially gratifying to sculpt after spending so much time in the past three months looking at and thinking about the great sculptures of the Renaissance.

Once the positives were coated evenly with clay, we began to build up the characters' features. You start with the nose and work out. The nose is obviously the salient point of most commedia characters. Some historians draw correspondences between nose size and stupidity, with the long-nosed Capitano as the biggest idiot on stage. The nose is also usually where the character's traditional resemblance to a particular animal becomes clear (though not always, as in the infamous case of the Arlecchino mask with the forcibly enlarged cat eyes). And on a purely practical level, it's the most exaggerated feature on almost every mask, so you have to use it as the basis for the rest of the proportions.

I'm working on a Dottore mask, since that's the character I tend to play best.

Lino commented that almost every first mask tends to look somewhat like its creator. He singled my mask out as an example. And everyone else agreed: apparently I make this face all the time as the Dottore.

Tomorrow we'll refine the clay molds. Then they'll become the basis for negative molds, which we'll use to create the actual latex masks. I think I'd be happy to keep working in clay forever.