Noh masks, more expressive eyes, and a change of direction for the masks?

Part of the suggestions in my Unit 1 feedback, was to look at noh masks. At the time I thought it was a by-the-by type suggestion in passing. However, like a lot of things JK says, I found myself coming back to it with new understanding... I'm pleased with 'Guilt' but the eyes are troubling me... and not in a good way. They look straight-ahead, but one of the things that makes an expression 'guilty' is downcast eyes. At the time I sort of convinced myself I couldn't do that, and so didn't try too hard... Also I was probably quite stressed by the making process - which seems to turn out well, but often seems to hover on the verge of disaster! 

Anyhoo... I know a bit about noh masks from my teenage obsession with Japan, and I thought I'd do some casual research into how they achieve expressions... Cue a deep cut scene with me swimming through the internet and Google Arts and Culture, only to emerge, with a gasp, like the infamous toilet scene in Trainspotting...

Some conclusion from my swimming trip:

• I do a fair amount of research for my art, but it's very practical/technical - I don't generally do enough inspiration trawling for a specific piece - I look for inspiration, but once I think I have it, I sort of lock myself away from other influences like I'll be corrupted
• Maybe JK's suggestion to look at noh masks was his subtle but effective way to say "pull your finger out of your fanny hole, and actually look at all the things like the thing you are doing that have gone before! You aren't the first reasonably clued up human on earth"
• Noh masks are amazing
• Masks are amazing
• People are amazing
• Google Arts and Culture is actually a cool tool for 'inspiration surfing'
• I need to revisit 'Guilt' and see if I can do MORE to make the eyes work
• I need to revisit the masks in general and consider if the current sort of 'magical realism' approach is the way to go

Noh masks are very cool - all masks that exist are examples of a set of named masks, which in turn belong to families of masks - there's a really neat database of them. The masks are very cleverly designed so that changing the angle of the mask, changes the expression - look up and the mask looks 'happy', look down and the mask looks 'sad' - there's a paper (which I have yet to read) that tries to analyse exactly how this is done.

Meanwhile, I've been doing a bit of experimentation, taking two photos of myself, one neutral, the other 'guilty' and trying to extract the features involved:

Yeah, I had no top on, but I was wearing underpants, so it's ok. I was focused on the eyes when I was pulling the expression, so it's perhaps not representative, but it's amazing how little of the rest of the face moved, and yet it looks guilty. The eyes really change shape, A LOT! I think there's couple of things at work - firstly the eyelids are more lowered, but secondly, the face is probably tipped forward slightly, exposing more of the '3d shape' of the eyes, so the lower lid become more 's-shaped'.

The 'Guilt' mask does have any eyes, just holes, so I tried removing the irises:

It still works, but much less well... Interestingly, the noh masks DO have irises - or rather they have the whites of the eyes and the irises are the 'holes' - making them almost impossible to see out of, but offering a direction for my mask.

So I want to experiment with making little 'test' inserts for 'Guilt' to simulate having the changed eye-shape, and the white. If that looks like it works, I'll commit to some 'surgery' on the mask itself to change the eyes for real... I'm sweating, but I have to be prepared to kill my darlings to make them better!

ALSO

I'm really drawn to the idea of doing something radically different... While I was looking for inspiration, I found this mask from Africa (thought to be Ivory Coast):

Seeing the simplified shape, and the use of incised lines to depict features opened my mind - why am I trying to produce colourful realistic masks? I mean I still want to do that AS WELL, but this plus the experiment above gave me an idea - make a very simple white mask, and then draw on the lines above - it would look almost like a piece of medical training material. I'm drawn at the moment to making art that has an acetic inspired by science - the wax heads will probably end up with little hand-drawn labels like scientific specimens. So after my experiment with 'Guilt', rather than make 'Despair', I'm going to experiment with a minimalist version of 'Guilt' based on the drawings above.