The Actor - Who Are You?

The Actor - Who Are You
122 x 91.5 cm 

My son, the actor Laurence Fuller, has been acting since he was ten years old. For two decades I've watched him come alive on stage as someone or something else.

We all put on masks. Portray a version of ourselves we think other people want to see, or we want them to see. It's a fascinating aspect of the Human Condition that we are hidden.

Who are you really? Only you can know that. And the search to find out who you are takes a lifetime.

I hope that every person viewing this painting sees themselves. And that by viewing their guilty hidden selves they release something and become a better version of themselves, a more accepting version.

Some of my favourite artworks and literature tell of the animal side of our nature. The Tale of Gilgamesh and the story of the wild man Enkidu, the Golden Fleece of Greek Mythology and the Ram of Ancient Mesopotamia.

In our modern day culture, we have The Joker. From Roman through Medieval times, the Joker/Fool perhaps reached its Shakespearean heights as the jester in aristocratic courts across Europe. But she’s in all of us.

I wrote this about the work before the Covid-19 Pandemic. Now as I look back I am shocked that I made a portrait of my son wearing a mask before the Pandemic began. I started the portrait of him in January added the mask on the 10th of February without any conscious conception of what we were about to experience. It was finished on the 14th February 2020.