As part of Magnifying Glasses 2.0, I’ve been working on a piece entitled “You Are on the Wrong Side” which is a mounted gas mask with the text (the title) visible through the eyes.  Yesterday I stripped off the existing paint on the eye, nose and mouth pieces to reveal some beautiful brass around the eyes, and some ugly gray aluminum on the other parts.  I decided to break out my package of gold leaf to see how it would look, as I want the metallic parts to be the same color.  All in all, it looks better than I expected.  It is rather difficult to get the gold leaf into the crevices, but with repeated touchups, I think I’ll get there. I then tried out copper leaf on the rubber mask itself, and to my surprise, it adheres quite well!  I removed the bronze pigment powder that I had put on yesterday and brushed on a coat of size (aka glue) before leaving the studio.  Hope all goes well tomorrow.  I still need to work on the mounting and the text itself, but that should be the easy part.

It’s my goal to make the mask a paradoxically beautiful object, and on the conceptual side, it implies the riches made on warfare, giving more meaning to the text beyond its initial pun.