Anatomy of an On-Stage Persona, Part One
Some artists make use of a public persona to hide who they truly are. Some artists use a persona as a way to market themselves. And then there are those who use them to make an artistic expression. It has taken me a long time to figure out how to present myself to the public in order to get THE DESTINY SAGA promoted. I think that the dual personas of “The Boy” and “The Lost Child” will help me to achieve to express not only what my books are about, but also to express how I feel about the world that we live in.
With that being said, I wanted to do a three-part series of blog posts to explain what it is that I am trying to do:
Part One: Anatomy of an On-Stage Persona
Part Two: The Boy (ver.2.0)
Part Three: The Lost Child
Now let’s start at the beginning….
I designed this symbol when I was 18 years old. I was always fascinated with those old school family crests and I wanted to have a symbol to describe who I was. I also wanted to have an image that was provocative and caused people to do a double take. I was always amused about the human race’s flawed reasoning of judging people, places and things without diving below the surface(present company included). So allow me to dive below the surface of this image.
1. The Triangle:
The Triangle represents a number of trinities in our human culture. There is the trinity of the life cycle: Birth, Life, and Death. There is the trinity of what makes us human: Mind, Body, and Spirit. There is the trinity of the Storyteller: Beginning, Middle, and End. And last, but certainly not least, there is the Christian Trinity: The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost.
The color blue that resides within the triangle represents the feelings that any of these trinities can give me at any given moment: blue as a representative of truth and hope; and blue as a representative of profound sadness.
2. The Cross and the Sai Daggers:
The Cross is deceptively self-explanatory, but most people knee jerk reactions of what they think I’m trying to say with it are off. Growing up Christian would obviously make an impact on what this image would mean to me, but it also fuels some of my opinions about symbols in our cultures.
I grew up Baptist but went to a Catholic school and my young mind would always wonder why, if people believed the same thing, there were so many different rules and rituals amongst the various denominations around the world. I would extend this concept of differing perspectives to neighboring religions, agnosticism, and atheism. I learned quickly through my philosophical “musings” that contradiction and hypocrisy was the defining trait of every single human being that ever existed.
This leads to the image of the Sai Daggers. They were first brought to my attention as a child watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (of all things) and after seeing the first live action movie, the character of Raphael resonated deeply within me. Full of anger and loneliness, but with a lot of love for his family, I could definitely identify with those contradictions as well as the contradictions in religion and the human race in total.
So I put the image of the cross, the supposed image of peace, next to the sais, my supposed image of unrest( the similarity in the form of both images doesn’t escape me). The totality of this image is pretty much my observation on humanity’s inconsistency.
“The Original Boy”
At some point, I wanted to have an alter ego I could perform as during shows and certain interviews, so I created THE BOY to represent the struggle we all go through. He would be a warrior of some sort who would try to keep humanity balanced. He would ultimately be an anime-like character whose imagery would survive long beyond my aging physical body and mortality. He would endure in animated features, artwork, and songs. He would represent my theory that adulthood was nothing more than a collective of “jaded adolescent screwups who could, at any time, rise above their potential”.
But the concept was never fully realized until I decided last year to split his character in two. And that would make things infinitely more fun for me…
To be continued in Part Two: The Boy(ver. 2.0).
Karen Weathers' Linian Legacy 