Having spent more than four years depicting eyes and the band of the human face immediately above and below the eyes, I wanted to work on full face portraiture again.
In the usual way of things, I arrived at my concept through several smaller decisions, whose exact order and reasoning I can't recall. Suffice to say that, just as with the way that Obscured Faces refers to the many reasons a person might cover their face, I wanted another overarching, but multifaceted parameter within which to do portraits. And I landed on people with their eyes closed.
We, humans, close our eyes for many reasons, sometimes purposefully in order to cause relaxation, sometimes involuntarily, as with sneezing, but also as (a generally involuntary) part of such big emotions as joy, excitement, ecstasy, desperation, and sadness.
That's quite a range of emotions/reasons.
Rather than bite off more than I can chew and try to depict that entire range, I'm going to start with laughter. Then I'll move on to serenity. And then to prayer.
Those of you that know me should realize that even though I have just pronounced what sounds like a plan of successive stages, I will, of course, be working on at least two, if not all three of these, at once and will in fact bite off more than I can chew and be completely overwhelmed.