ADDRESS: 1421 Roper Mountain Road Apt #416 - Greenville, SC 29611

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WEB SITE: www.robertmahosky.com

But it's the people; the strength of the people I've painted; the power of their faces. I do eyes well. That's important because that's where the expression, the experience is. The point of my paintings is reaction and that comes from the expression of the people I paint.

I am a television videographer and it has been largely the stories and the people I have shot that are my resource, the well of my material. I am basically a loner. The camera can distance you. It even makes you feel a little invincible. Maybe that's my courage to approach the strength that I see in other people. And I see that strength in the "outsiders" of life, the freaks and geeks, the hippies. The strength of these people to go their own way. I could never do it. So I am compelled to capture them.

But it was the people in Rwanda, the children mostly, that have left a lasting impression on me. I still paint those faces. Probably, I will alwayspaint them. I have never been that overcome. But how could you not. It was in 1995, an assignment, six months after the massacre of 800,000 people. It was dangerous. We went to a refugee camp for children, 3000 of them. We walked up to them and they sang for us. They were all damaged. I saw the damage in all of them through the camera lens.

The way I work when the images come from my assignments, from the videotape, is to isolate a split second's image and more or less, use that as my artists sketch. So the faces I paint, of the Rwandans particularly, are an actual captured second in their lives, their reaction to that time. You see the finished painting a living moment in someone's life. The tears, the fears, the courage, the hope, the loneliness.

The facets I use in painting the faces came from the planes and angles, the light and shadow I saw through the camera. They're also broken lines, shards of broken glass. I first draw the faces, faceted, in black and white on canvas or clay board or paper, as the case may be. The drawing is more important to me than the color. I color intuitively. Golden is standing out for me now. It does more for the expression but I see a progression to reds and browns and even metallic for stronger images. What would that do to the faces of Rwanda