Faces

When first exhibited at a Hobart gallery in April of 2003, the Ancestral Altar was sanded and polished as smooth and unblemished as a baby’s skin.

Then I left it on top of a water tank for a year and a half.

Yesterday, I re-oiled and applied a soothing balm onto the cracked and blotchy wood that had weathered into it the skin of an old person.

It took a certain amount of courage on my part to risk “ageing” this piece, but looking at it now, the colors and surface quality is gorgeous as it seems to have just come out of an ancient Mayan temple.

It shines with character and a deeper beauty; a beauty more aptly reflecting what an “ancestral altar” should look like; a beauty born from the effects of wind, rain and sun. A beauty not held back with botox, face lifts, nose jobs, implants and enhancements.

If only we humans could move away from the Peter Pan beauty ethic and allow “life” to be our only beautician.

As David Whyte writes in (sections of) “The Faces At Braga”:

….If only our own faces
would allow the invisible carver’s hand
to bring the deep grain of love to the surface….

….If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carvers hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers

feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features
of the mountain and the cloud and the sky.

Our faces would fall away
until we, growing younger toward death
every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration

to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver’s hands.

David Whyte