I love clowns! I love them for so many reasons. They represent a grotesque exaggeration of masculinity. The fake painted on smile, the white make up, the drunkard's red nose, the bald cap, the crown.

In this clown is suffering from that fucking bow, meant to express this guy's suffering from the contrivance of his performance. He’s done. He just wants the show to be over. The expression is a look of complete resignation from the artificiality of the rituality of being a clown.

I fell in love with Norman Rockwell’s circus clown paintings, when I recently visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge Massachusetts. His portrayals of clowns when they are off the clock, just haunted me. There was one in particular where a group of kids are nervously approaching a clown as he is smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper clearly ignoring the kids. What struck me about these paintings and what I wanted to convey in this piece is the exhaustion of the performance. For me I feel this way as an instructor. I have to put on my shiny nose and perform a song and dance to motivate students or to connect with colleagues in committee or department meetings. I love it, but it also can be simply exhausting.