I once saw a therapist to help deal with feelings of depression. One of her psychologist mantras was, "Fake it until you make it." Namely, that if we wish to feel or live in a certain manner, we should pretend to that reality until it finally comes upon us. It was her opinion that such a game can help us to transform our thinking and our behavior to effect a new reality. I never had the patience or the fortitude to play such charades. In this regard the words of Popeye the sailor resonate within me, "I am what I am and that's all that I am."
In some ways, I wish that I could project a young Sean Connery, confident, mysterious, brash, and sauve, but that would be an impossible make-over given the raw material that is me. I am not made of such stuff. The stylized version of me that I would like to be the reality, is well beyond my prosaic ability to pretend or to project. The best that I can do is to provide some kind of abstract representation of myself. What you see of me contains all of the elements of who I really am, but morphed and distorted. Without the appropriate fragment of the Rosetta Stone, you are not likely to understand the correspondence between the abstract to the literal. That is mainly for my protection and peace of mind. I really have no great desire to trick you into accepting me more fully for this pantomime.
The third part of the art project focused on transforming the literal into the abstract. My daughter chose to make her candy bar into something that reflected some elements of the literal, but ultimately was non-representational.
(Part 3 of 3)
