Ohio-based artist Christian Faur‘s earliest memories of making art involve crayons. Aiming, in part, to capture that feeling a kid gets when they open a fresh, new, box of crayons, Faur is now using those pristine crayons to create pointillist art works that alter subtly as viewers move around the gallery.
His “Forgotten Children” series, which depicts fuzzy children’s faces is strangely eerie, but evocative. Says Faur: This experimental series of blurred children portraits focuses on images of children as anonymous individuals. The final images are littered with common names of children rendered in “crayonAlphabet” color. The anonymity of these individuals is reflected in both the technique and the written text that is being used in each individual frame as a face without a name is only a fiction of an individual. One of the faces used in the series is a self portrait of myself as a child, rendered in the same style and with the same set of random common names, to appear similar in every to the other portraits, one portrait among the many.
The idea behind the unknown faces comes from my attempt to “fill” a lost childhood with fictional children that I might have known if I could only remember that time period of my life. The private color language used to spell out the several hundreds of names of these anonymous individuals, further distances the similarity of any real child from that of a pretend playmate. The names of these ghosts, like so much fiction, are written in the lost language of crayons from a forgotten youth.
