Don’t Make Me Laugh

“Don’t Make Me Laugh” has a few sources of inspiration. I started working on it (literally) a few decades ago and have picked it up and added to it from time to time. It started with my fascination with gargoyles and faces carved in brownstone buildings or terra cotta. I loved the intense stares and exaggerated features – not to mention the craftsmanship and the ornate decorative features that accompanied them on old buildings. Architectural imagery found its way into my textile design work, embroidery, and printmaking.

The face I designed for “Don’t Make Me Laugh” was originally an oil pastel drawing on brown kraft paper, and a model for a 10-color silk screen print. I decided to turn the face into a sculptural piece when I found an extra chunk of pink insulation foam in the studio at SUNY-College at Old Westbury. There was just enough for four faces, including the noses and brows. If I recall correctly, the mouths were carved much later. I was considering mounting them on a new piece of the insulation foam and trying to make them look like an architectural fragment, but it seemed too bulky, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to replicate the look of stone to that extent. I ended up putting it aside until I had a better sense of what more to do with it.

At that point the faces were carved into their overall shape, but none of the features had been attached, and I don’t think I had done much carving on them. Fast forward about 20 or more years, and I finally finished the noses and brows, and carved the mouths. I put them aside again, and stored them near each other, but didn’t finish them. When I was starting a new graduate class, and needed to think about what to make, I came across the pieces in my studio. I wasn’t using them for the class, but I assembled each face, attaching the facial features using tissue paper and glue, which I also used to cover the remaining surface. (I had developed a method for creating texture in my painting and sculpture using these materials and knew it would be appropriate if I continued my original path to make them look like brownstone.) I gessoed them and put them aside for at least a decade.

In the summer of 2023, I decided that it was time to either rework some of my old art and finish it or destroy it and throw it out. I brought the pieces home from my storage space, repaired them, and re-gessoed them. “Something” was still missing. I decided that three of the gargoyle faces should look very serious and face forward, but that one needed to do something silly, as though it were breaking out of the stone. That’s when I thought about the faces people make when others try to look serious for a camera…and I made a tongue to stick out of its mouth, and traced my hand and wrist to begin the arms for the face of the third piece from the left. When the arms and hands were attached and prepped, I painted all the pieces with brown (kind of a burnt sienna) acrylic that was almost the color of brownstone. I went back into each face, adding subtle color to enhance the highlights and shadows.

The foam looked somewhat like stone, but it wasn’t really capturing the effect I wanted. I decided to scribble on one with acrylic markers, just to see what it looked like, and BAM – that was the thing it needed! Layering of the scribbles took a few days, and reapplications of color on top of color. The last thing was to purchase some wood for the hanging mechanism (a piece of 1x3, and a piece of 1x2), cover them with tissue paper and glue, attach them, and add hanging hardware. This piece, although it seems different from much of my other work, actually includes imagery and techniques that I have developed over the course of my life. It’s interesting to see how it can all be combined in different ways to achieve different effects.