
#36/365 Paintings
Gee the Pierrot character is more than a ‘sad clown’ — apparently this pale faced character is a philosophy. So many art forms came out of one man, “Pierrot.”
Pierrot stood for people, struggling, sometimes tragically, to secure a place in the bourgeois world. And subsequent artistic/cultural movements found him related to their cause: the Symbolists saw him as a lonely fellow-sufferer. His white face and costume, suggesting not only innocence but the pallor of the lifeless.
Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse with large buttons and wide white pantaloons. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim, more rarely with a conical shape like a dunce’s cap.
I will be exploring this character some more in this series. I’m fascinated by the sympathetic clown who wears the most amazing pajamas I’ve ever seen and gets away with false eyelashes no matter which gender. This particular character has the look of “falling off her ice skates” which just happen to be platform shoes for the stage. The dreamlike quality of innocence and the mask of the struggling to an out of reach social class. Yet so beautiful though the stage lights might be a bit too bright!