The Virus Has Stolen Your Face From Me
As a
portrait artist, all I can do now is reconstruct the mysteries of who you are
under the mask.
By Riva
Lehrer
Ms.
Lehrer is a visual artist and writer.
- Dec. 10, 2020
The author’s portrait of Alice Wong, a disability activist, made
over Zoom.
Credit...Riva Lehrer, via Zolla/Lieberman
Gallery
Today’s sightings: red paisley mask,
pleated pink flowered mask, black VOTE mask, yellow smiley-face mask, Etsy
bedazzled mask, Spiderman mask. Lots of surgical-blue paper masks. A few
hard-shell N95s. One or two navy bandit gaiters. (Me, I’m under the grinning-wolf
mask.) Most masks hide who we are and let us try on different identities, but
these disguises give me clues to the wearer underneath.
As an artist, I appreciate the variety
and wit of these choices. But all the color and texture in the world can’t
obscure the fact that masks are both saving my life and ruining it.
This is not a plea to take
yours off. For all that’s holy, don’t. I even double-mask: There’s a surgical
version taped to my face under the cloth mask du jour.
The thing is, I’m the
last person to want faces to disappear. I’m a portrait artist. Faces are my
whole life. I think of the human face as a theater that performs the actor
inside, in flickers and puckers and pulls of 42 tiny muscles, in the rise and
fall of blood that swirls with our emotions. I paint the glint of bone under
the skin, the subtle glow of fat along the cheeks and chin, the grooves that
descend from nose to mouth that tell me whether you laugh more often than you
growl. Now we pass on the sidewalk like spies from distant countries. I try to
reconstruct the mysteries under the mask, but there’s no satisfying my face
hunger.
This hunger is deeper than aesthetic
fascination; it goes all the way back to my earliest years. I grew up in the
hospital. Because I was born with spina bifida and underwent dozens of
surgeries by the time I was 5, I was constantly surrounded by white-coated
doctors and white-uniformed nurses, each of whom were in charge of my body.
Each made me fear for what would happen next: Was I going back to surgery?
Being sent for painful tests? Was I ever going home? I had no authority to say
no, so I learned to read the truth in grown-up faces no matter what their words
might say. I studied their subtle signals with the passionate dedication of a
Talmudic scholar.
For me, each mask is a small but
painful theft. The virus has stolen your face from me; it’s even stolen my face
from myself. I use my face to mitigate people’s reactions to my body — my
curved spine, my orthopedic boots, my silver-red hair, my limp. I beam out my
expressions — and my words — to defend myself against harassment. Against
ignorance. Against being ignored. Now my mask muffles my voice, kidnaps my face
and reduces my body to a diagnosis.
All that is difficult enough, but how
can I convey the misery of being a portrait artist during a pandemic? For 30
years, I’ve depicted people who experience stigma. My subjects have been
mocked, threatened, demeaned because of the way they look or move or enact
their identities. I paint to make them visible as they truly are, as bearers of
iconoclastic beauty. Portraiture is the purpose of my life.
Visibility is crucial. Many of my
collaborators — they are not mere subjects, but partners in creation — are
disabled, or queer, or trans, or people of color; those, in fact, who are most
at risk from Covid-19. Faces that aren’t just masked, but are entirely missing
from public life. People who, like me, are at such medical risk that we have
little choice but to shelter in place. We’ve been rendered invisible as well as
vulnerable, our lives controlled by those who don’t mask, who are, to be frank,
barefaced threats. How do we remind them that we exist from behind a million
closed doors?
And so, my career has
been upended. I can’t make portraits if I can’t let anyone into my studio. I’d
need a space the size of an airplane hangar to create sufficient social
distance, and even then, I’d have to view my subjects through a telescope. Not
quite the intimate experience one wants when doing a portrait.
It took me a while to realize how much
trouble I was in. When the virus hit, I had two partially completed drawings in
progress — one of my college boyfriend, William
Fugo;
the other of the Cuban novelist Achy Obejas. Will is in Cleveland, Achy in San
Francisco. We thought that we’d see each other again soon — surely this
couldn’t last more than a month or two? By April, the answer was obvious. I
reconciled myself to working from photographs and from “posing” sessions over
Zoom, in which my laptop screen offered an aggravating fraction of reality.
Truth is, all
portraits, no matter the medium, are only fragments. None can capture the
complexity of a human life. The portraitist chooses the symbols and stories
that represent the subject, in constrained gestures toward the immensity of
biography. I suppose that a Zoom protocol is appropriate for our time. We’re
all coping with enforced separation, trying to reassemble one another from
fragments, from pictures on our screens and glimpses under the mask. A video
session is communion and isolation rolled into one. A faux-intimacy that is our
daily lot.
William
Fugo sat for his portrait in Cleveland while the author was in Chicago.
Credit...Riva Lehrer, via Zolla/Lieberman Gallery
A
portrait of Cuban novelist Achy Obejas, who was in San Francisco.
Credit...Riva Lehrer, via Zolla/Lieberman Gallery
I decided to ask Alice Wong, a
disability activist, to sit for me. She lives in San Francisco, 2,000 miles
away. For weeks, we met over an unstable internet connection. Zoom vastly
increases the accessibility of my practice — I can work with anyone, anywhere,
no matter their disability or my own.
Yet, imagine that you’re used to the
cloistered privacy of the studio, just you and your collaborator. You’ve
carefully composed the lighting, designed the costuming and props. Imagine the
hours of languorous conversation, the breaks for cookies and cocktails. And
then, imagine that in the midst of posing, your subject shifts or gestures and
it’s so unexpectedly beautiful that everything changes. That’s the thing about
real life; it can take your breath away.
Now, shrink all that down to a
13-inch-by-9-inch digital portal. I can see Alice’s hallway behind her; a few
framed pictures show me that she loves cats. My eyes aren’t great, so it
doesn’t help that the lighting is dreadful and that the screen flattens any dimensional
information and that all colors are distorted. Alice sends me pictures of
herself in sunlight, so I can see the true shades of skin, hair and eyes, but
those photos are so radically different that I fall back on what the laptop
tells me, so that the feeling of Zoom won’t be lost.
After we
finished, Alice interviewed me for her Disability Visibility Project. She described what
it was like to pose; she was surprised by how much we talked, having assumed I
would demand that she stay statue-still. I’ve learned to work around that,
because the conversations I have with disabled people, queer and gender-variant
people, with BIPOC collaborators, are the real point of my portraiture. The
relationship between artist and subject always disappears in the museum, the
gallery, but I truly want to know what transpires between the artist and the
subjct. My collaborators saved my life. I could not endure my own stigmatized
body until I learned how they navigated the intricacies of embodiment.
But that was then.
These days, my studio is mostly silent
— no whir of the pencil sharpener, no scratch of erasers, no slosh of water as
I thin down a heavy glaze. Brushes tilt in their orderly jars. Pencils stand
upright, graphite, charcoal, pastel. Three shelves of tubed acrylics lie inert
as dead fish, while my wooden easel is a ship becalmed on flat seas. I carry my
cup of coffee from the kitchen to the living room and don’t even bother to turn
on the studio lights. A portrait on my easel provides the illusion of
companionship. What a strange new loneliness.
I need you back.
But I can only have you back if you
stay veiled, for now. Please, keep your masks on for just a while longer. Blue
mask, red mask, purple mask — some day they will be laid aside, and we will
meet in my studio in joy.
Riva Lehrer is
an artist and the author of the memoir “Golem Girl.”
