Every month or two the walls of the much celebrated Black Water Cafe sport a new collection of work from a local artist. The latest set is the work of a newcomer to the Tacoma art world, Maria Jost. Loosely titled This is a Storytale the artist statement reads, “This is a collection of 12 drawing/paintings topographically centered around the faces in the artist’s very own real life storytale.”

The human face is an infinite source of mystery and magic. How is it that the same set of molecules and arrangement of orifices can produce the impression of both love and hatred (sometimes simultaneously) simply by changing the tension in the muscles below the pliable skin? If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then your face is its house. How often I sat across from a friend or lover and simply found myself lost in the unique sculpting of their features. It is all the more magical to be transported into further enthrallment as an emotion floods and passes across the theater of their countenance. 

The truest of artists have tried to capture these moments, a static demonstration of the power held within the facial expression. To paint an angry face well, one must stare into the eyes of anger at least long enough to know its form. For the image to capture and faithfully reflect any emotion, the artist must be unafraid to face it. Thus, half the skill of this type of art is in the willingness to plunge into and navigate the depths of that ghost that puppets the soft skin covering the front of our skulls. 

In Jost‘s work I see hope, stability, resolve, self love, power, sorrow, longing, shame, lust, contentment and more. To have created so many paintings covering so many bits of the feelings and relationships in her storytale, the artist must have exhausted every corner of her perceptive soul. Moving a step further, she has illustrated the unseen (but surely felt) parts of the human encounter by shaping and texturing whirls and squiggles of hair into gestures that I can compare only to an aura-like body language. This work is innovative because it questions what can be communicated from one person to another without words. In a world lived online and relationships held via textersations, Jost has demonstrated the undeniable power of face-to-face contact.

[Black Water Cafe, 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, 747 Fawcett Ave., Tacoma, www.blackwatertacoma.com]