I get asked about the faces in my work a lot.
Who is that? Is that somebody you know? Is it based on a real person?
Usually, the answer is not as simple as people expect.
The faces in Unapologetic Faces: The Cost of Being Seen are not portraits of specific people. I think of them as archetypes. They represent emotions and parts of the human experience that most of us recognize, even when the face itself belongs to no one.
What interests me is how often someone looks at one of those faces and says, “I see myself.”
I understand why. But maybe not for the reason you would think.
I Don’t Start With a Face
When I create a piece, I usually have something in mind. It could be a person, an event, a conversation I had, something I witnessed, or something I am dealing with personally.
But I do not really start with an image.
I start with an emotion.
That is an important distinction for me.
I have talked with other artists about their process, and many begin with some idea of where they are going. Maybe they have sketched something. Maybe they already know what the composition should look like. Even if the final work changes, there is some visual destination in their head.
My process is different.
I may know what started me thinking, but I do not necessarily know what the finished face is going to look like. I know what I need it to feel like.
So when I finish a piece, the question is not really, “Do I see myself in this?”
It is: Do I still feel the emotion that started it?
That is how I know whether I am getting somewhere.
Sometimes seeing too much of myself in a finished piece actually bothers me. I do not necessarily want that. Actors often talk about disappearing into a role. I understand that instinct. I do not want every piece to become Corey looking back at me.
I want to create enough room for somebody else to enter it.
Because once the work leaves my hands, it should not require you to have lived my exact experience in order to feel something.
What I Mean When I Say Archetype
I have to admit something.
The first time somebody described my work as archetypal, I had to go look up “archetype.” I am an educated person, but I remember thinking, Archetype? Archetypes? What exactly are we talking about?
Once I began understanding the idea, though, it made sense to me.
I am not interested in giving an academic definition here. I can only tell you what archetype has come to mean in my own work.
To me, an archetype is connected to the emotions and experiences that keep appearing throughout human life: love, fear, anxiety, disappointment, anger, grief, desire, joy.
We all experience them.
We do not experience them in exactly the same way, and we certainly do not express them the same way. One person’s grief might make them cry. Another person gets very quiet. Somebody else gets angry. Another person keeps working and does not deal with it until six months later.
The expression changes. The human experience underneath it is still recognizable.
Some emotions transform us. Some keep us stuck. Some take years to understand. Sometimes something we once thought destroyed us becomes the thing that changed our life.
That is the territory I am interested in.
The faces become my expression of those emotional experiences.
This is also where the title The Cost of Being Seen starts to matter.
I have spent much of my life having people tell me that I could not hide how I felt. My face would tell on me. I would wonder how people knew something was wrong before I said anything. Some people have what we call a poker face. I do not.
But think about that phrase for a second. Even a poker face is an expression.
The person may be controlling what they are showing you, but that does not mean there is not an emotion underneath it.
Our faces can begin telling our story before we say a word.
I have written before about why the face is often the first thing we read in a work of art. This series takes that idea one step further: what happens when the face is invented, but the emotional response to it is real?
Two People Can See the Same Face and Experience Two Different People
I think about siblings when I think about interpretation.
I am an only child, so this is not my personal experience, but we have all heard versions of it. Two siblings grow up in the same house with the same parents and somehow describe completely different childhoods.
How can that happen?
Because they did not actually have the same experience. They had the same address. That is different.
I always tell people something that sounds obvious once you hear it: we do not experience ourselves.
Other people experience us.
They experience our words, our actions, our tone, our facial expressions, our body language, our habits, and how we respond to them. Then they interpret all of it.
That is why two people can look at the same face in my work and tell me two entirely different stories about what they are seeing.
Neither response necessarily surprises me.
Take tears.
Paint and other elements in some of my compositions can read as tears. Sometimes they are tears. But then the interpretation begins.
One person looks and sees sorrow. Another sees happiness. Someone sees grief. Someone else sees relief. Another person sees a breakthrough. One sees somebody falling apart. Another sees somebody finally letting something go.
How does one interpret tears?
That depends on the person looking.
Some of the pieces that people have interpreted as sad were not created during sad moments at all. That is what fascinates me.
The image has not changed. The person standing in front of it has brought something to it.
Research on facial communication also cautions against assuming that a facial movement has one fixed emotional meaning. Context, culture, situation, and the observer all matter when we interpret what a face is communicating. A useful overview can be found in research indexed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
I have also written more broadly about why we recognize ourselves in contemporary art. What I am interested in here is more specific: what happens when the face itself was never a real person in the first place?
Art Lovers Are Unique Creatures
I mean that affectionately.
Art lovers and art enthusiasts can look at a piece in completely different ways.
Someone who has never formally studied art may stand in front of something and respond completely from instinct.
“I do not know why. I just like it.”
Or: “That makes me uncomfortable.”
Or: “That reminds me of my mother.”
Then you have somebody who has studied art, spent years in galleries, learned composition, art history, or design.
They are looking at every edge. Every corner. Why did the artist use black there? Why red? Why is that eye sitting at that angle? Why is the subject not smiling? Why does the composition stop there? What is intentional? What is accidental?
They are looking at the same work, but they have been taught to dissect what they are seeing.
I find that fascinating because it brings us back to interpretation.
We are not simply looking at art. We are looking through everything we already know: education, memory, experience, loss, relationships, taste, fear, desire, even what we have been taught art is “supposed” to look like.
All of that can walk into the room with us.
Sometimes I Don’t Finish a Piece Until I Can Feel It Again
This may be the most personal part of my process.
If I start a work from an emotion, I have to stay connected to that emotion long enough to create the piece.
That is not always easy.
Sometimes it means reliving my own trauma. Or disappointment. Love. Sadness. Anger.
Sometimes a work takes months because I have to put it down.
I may try to come back to it, but if I cannot reconnect to whatever emotional place started it, something feels wrong.
I can work on the image. I can manipulate it in Photoshop and Illustrator. I can use AI-assisted tools as part of developing and mastering the image. I can technically keep working.
But technique cannot manufacture the emotional part for me.
Sometimes I have to leave.
Then something happens in my life and that feeling returns. I go back to the unfinished work. Suddenly it works.
That is when the magic happens.
I have a piece called Beautiful Accident that came out of exactly that kind of experience.
It really was an accident. Something happened that was not planned, and I remember looking at it and realizing, This is beautiful.
People have told me the face reminds them of Sinéad O’Connor. It is not Sinéad O’Connor. It just happens to look that way to some people.
But the piece was not complete when I first worked on it. I let it go.
Later, during a period when I was feeling deeply sad about things happening in my own life, I came back to it. Something connected.
I looked up and there it was.
Beautiful Accident. Finished.
Maybe We’re Built to Look for Faces
There is another part of this that goes beyond my studio.
Human beings see faces everywhere.
Look at clouds long enough and eventually somebody sees a face. People see them in buildings, shadows, electrical outlets, food, rocks, and all kinds of random arrangements.
Psychologists have a name for this: face pareidolia, the tendency to perceive faces in visual patterns where an actual face is not present. Research suggests that our visual system is highly responsive to face-like configurations. One review of this phenomenon is available through PubMed Central.
So perhaps seeing something familiar in an unfamiliar face is not as strange as it sounds.
We are looking for faces all the time.
Then, once we find one, we begin interpreting it.
And that is where biology stops being the whole explanation.
Because you are not only recognizing two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.
You are asking: What happened to this person? Why are they looking at me like that? Are those tears? Is that pain? Is that confidence? Why does this face make me feel something?
And sometimes: Why do I feel like I know this person?
If You See Yourself, I Did My Job
When someone tells me they see themselves in one of my faces even though the person does not actually exist, I think it is really cool.
More than that, I think it means something worked.
I started with an emotion. I stayed with it. Sometimes I had to put the piece away. Sometimes I had to come back to it after living a little more life.
Eventually that emotion became a face.
Then someone who knows nothing about the conversation, person, disappointment, joy, anger, trauma, or experience that originally put me in that emotional place stands in front of the finished work and feels something they recognize.
It may not even be the same emotion I was feeling.
That is okay.
Maybe that is the point.
If you can see your own experience inside a face I created from mine, then the emotion traveled.
And if that happens, I did my job.
Related reading: The Psychology of Collecting Art: Why One Face Refuses to Leave Your Mind and Why the Face Is the First Thing We Read in a Work of Art.
Related work: Beautiful Accident and Love Your Face.
