Lori Schkufza | Gutter Rabbit Animation

This past September I was feeling the pull to do a monthly drawing challenge in October. The prompt lists that I started to see didn't excite me. They felt too disjointed and I wanted a collection, something cohesive, or something that told a clear narrative. I was itching to make another collection print, but I didn't want to do another cabinet or case. Which is what brought me to folk masks. We could create a gallery space for a fictional collection of masks on loan from various institutions, galleries and independent collectors.

I was immediately frustrated with the state of searching for masks on the internet. Every image search pulled up entirely too many images from Pinterest, and even worse, Etsy. I grabbed a few images from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and their collection, but I didn't want to recreate the Met's collection in full. I soon realized that I had to take my research on the road and enlist the assistance of a librarian at the public library. So for the better part of an afternoon I was looking through the catalogue with a librarian who would then print out the call numbers for me and send the requests for the books in the Closed Stacks. After a few hours and permission slips to check out books from the Closed Stacks, I returned home with a proper stack of gorgeous books filled with masks.

I poured over the books with a pile of post-its and then repeated and repeated. I took photos of the masks I wanted to include and soon I had my 31 masks for October. I made a moodboard, or a series of moodboards, made notes on what the masks were, where they were from and what they were used for.

Finally, I consulted my Japanese color dictionaries to find a Lori style garish color palette. By the final day of September we had everything we needed to start the monthly drawing challenge the next day.

I made an announcement graphic, which helped to inject some much needed accountability from the jump. We gave it a name, The Folk Collection, and let people know what to expect for the month on the two platforms where I was posting these– Substack and LinkedIn. Because I was posting these daily, including weekends, I took a break from my regular posting in those spaces to not get too overwhelmed. (It was honestly a nice break to not post LinkedIn stuff on LinkedIn.)

I published weekly recaps on Substack where I got more in the weeds on what it was like working on each mask, where they gave me trouble, where they just came together, and how many iterations it took to land on the final pieces.

Dog Mask

The Dog Mask set the tone for the series. We had the colors planned in advance, but I didn't pick my 5 brushes until I knew how I was going to treat these. There was a lot of searching to get to this point. When I don't draw on the regular, my style just naturally evolves quicker than I would like.

Ultimately I like where these landed. I had initially planned on going more graphic and simplified, but looking back now I can appreciate how I gave more focus and importance to material. I wanted the wood to come through, the stone, the fiber, the metal.