Hex Dancers
I grew up in a semi-rural area of far western Pennsylvania near a Pennsylvania Dutch community. Lots of people would decorate their barns with "hex signs." The designs were really colorful and striking, but they also scared me a little bit--something about how symmetrical they were, and their stylized shapes, were so different from anything else I'd seen and anything else in their surrounding environment, and it unnerved me as a little kid. Recently I was thinking about masks and and the hex sign designs and I thought it would be nice to see simple drawings of people wearing masks that were reminiscent of simplified hex designs. So I've started drawing these figures. I think of them as ceremonial dancers, even if they are not depicted dancing.
