Totem BWR Face: Down to Black, White, and Red

Totem BWR Face is the piece where I made myself stop. Every color I could have added, every extra line I could have drawn, I didn't.

BWR is exactly what it sounds like, black, white, red, and nothing else. No gradients, no shading, no fourth color sneaking in to soften anything. I wanted to see how much a face could still say once I stripped away everything except the three colors that show up in totems and masks across almost every culture that's ever carved one. There's a reason those three colors keep showing up throughout history. They're not decorative. They're primal.

The mouth is doing most of the talking in this piece. That wide red smile, cut against all that black, was the last thing I added and the thing that made the whole face come alive. Everything before that felt like a mask. Once the mouth went in, it stopped being a mask and started being a person, someone mid-laugh, or mid-shout, or mid-something I still can't quite name.

I think of this piece as a totem in the actual sense of the word: not just an image, but a marker. Something you'd put outside a door to say who lives here, or what they believe, or what they're not afraid to say out loud.

Totem BWR Face has been part of the collection since the very first month I started this site, and it's held up as one of the pieces people come back to. Sometimes the boldest thing you can do is take things away instead of adding them.

Available now as a museum-quality print, with the same face carried across a few other formats in the shop.