Face Beneath the Face

While viewing work of digital photographer and artist Nan Stombaugh at the Kingwood College Art Gallery, I did a double-take. In her exhibition, The Healing Collection, Stombaugh combines and juxtaposes her digital photographs with repurposed images to create evocative pictures that are more than the sum of their parts. The image that stopped me in my tracks and pulled me back for a second, closer look was of an angel carved in stone, the sort one finds in old cemeteries.

Years ago in New Orleans a young street performer dressed as a cemetery angel caught my attention and inspired an idea that grew into my young adult novel, Juliette Ascending. That book’s cover design depicts a white marble statue of an angel with a hint of color in her cheeks. Stombaugh’s photograph also hints at life. In it, I first saw a carved angel beneath a tree, light sifted through leaves, dappled shadows cast over mottled stone. Then, with a second look, I glimpsed something more in the forward tilt of the head, the downcast eyes, the individualistic shape of the nose, and the compressed lips caught in a secretive smile.

The street performer transformed herself with make-up and costume into a statue. My novel’s cover artist, Robin Carter, used color and design elements to suggest a statue might be flesh, not stone. How had Stombaugh merged the animate with the inanimate? Had she superimposed a living woman’s features upon the angel’s chiseled ones? Or was it the reverse? However she achieved it, the result appears to be a human face surfacing from beneath a cool stone one. Now I am struck by the contrast to another face I have just seen, one that passes for a woman’s face upon a woman’s form, yet sometimes the human features slip a little in conversation or slide away under duress, revealing a face beneath the face, one that belies the pretense of tender feelings, human or angelic. I cannot really call the face beneath inhuman, for calculation and cruelty are part of human nature. And both genuineness and deception have their place in art and fiction, in the images and characters they inspire.

Creating Characters Workshop

Creating Characters Who Sell
September 15, 22, 29, and October 6, 2009 7:00 - 8:30 PM
Lone Star College - Kingwood, 20000 Kingwood Drive, Kingwood, TX, The United States
http://www.lonestar.edu
In deciding which manuscripts to publish, many fiction editors say voice and character trump plot. Presenter Rosemary Poole-Carter, author of three published novels and four produced plays, will guide writers through the secrets a novelist can learn from playwrights and actors to captivate agents, editors, and readers. Please call 281-312-1660 to register.