Reid Barraza
Cindy Rehm
Advanced Drawing
12 March 2017
Self Portrait
In my self portrait I explore the contrasting yet simultaneous perceptions I have of myself. The entire portrait is composed of 6 pastel drawings which I created separately and then joined together to create a new legible face that is representative of myself, yet so distorted that I can view the portrait as the likeness of a new character completely distanced from myself. While I created each of these 6 drawings very spontaneously - allowing myself to be impacted emotionally on the instant - my preplanning for the project did include the development of a definitive goal.
Majority of the time I am most possessed by the judgement that I am a young, eager, joyful and uncertain actor. My juxtaposing states of character combined with my passion for the profession of shape-shifting and story-telling creates a very fragmented, encompassing and flexible self-portrait in my head. To capture my fragmented and flexible self, I thought about how cubist painters sought to capture many angles of the same object at once. In paintings like those of Picasso, for instance, viewers are faced with an abstraction that was created by the artist’s attempt to study the subject in as many ways as possible - from as many vantage points as possible - above, behind, from the front. The cubist’s unconventional commitment to detail and their resulting fractured-mirror-like images inspired me to create my character.
For further inspiration I leaned on illustrator Mary Grandpre and painter Gustav Klimt. While these artists created over different times and for different reasons and are studied today by very different groups of people, I personally view both artists’ body of work to strike a very intriguing balance between play and danger. In Mary Grandpre’s illustrations, we see soft pastel portraits of children and caricatured women, however the way the subjects are treated with electric, bold colors adds a sense of magic, drama and, for me, anxiety and danger into the characters. Similarly, in some of Klimt’s work we see beautiful young, healthy women wrapped in thick, velvety blacks and heavy golds. There is a coexistence of soft and hard, light and heavy, young and old, playful and dangerous. I had not referenced either of these artists before my creation of my portrait, however, now I can see how my love of these two artists’ works educated my on the color treatment of my portrait. The jewel tones and weighted black in my drawing function to create severity and other dualities to the otherwise definitively cheerful illustrations like that of a smiling face.
While I have drawn on other artists to assist the technique used in the creation of my self portrait, I am driven to express, as it brought me joy, that I created my portrait to reflect on parts of myself by myself - the portrait’s relationship with an expanded audiences was not a concern to me. To complete each drawing, I put something of myself that I am familiar with under a microscope, the texture of my hair, the razor burn on my neck, my heavy eye lids, and commented on how I felt when focusing on that feature for an extended amount of time. In the end, I realize fear, appreciation, fun, comedy, disgust and also love!
Coco Rocha on variety ...
same face under different lighting...
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