Symbolic Self Portrait

I typically dread doing self-portraits, but this assignment gave me a bit more freedom than I usually have. As I began to think about the assignment, different ways of completing it began to form. My first idea was to draw my collection of movie, concert, and theatre tickets I've accumulated over the past 5 years. This idea was quickly discarded, and I tried to think of something more introspective.

The past few years have been a struggle to figure out what exactly I want to do with my life. I entered Chapman as an undeclared student not really sure what to pick as a major. While I enjoy political science and can see myself going down that career path, I'm not sure yet what I'm passionate about. Art is the same, I enjoy it but I don't want to be an artist, or at least not in the traditional sense. (Showing art at galleries, having a patron).

I feel like I'm living in limbo. I'm not really sure what I'm doing. Along with not know comes self-doubt and confusion. While these thoughts can feel like a constant weight on my shoulders, it helps to know that MANY people my age are experiencing the same thing. This article by Susan Hiller touches on this. So for my self-portrait, I wanted to try and portray that feeling.

Nyssa Sharp's self-portrait displays the feeling of inner monologue. I liked her approach of not fully displaying the face but still using the area to convey a message. The eyes are the main facial feature you see in my portrait, I used them to show how lost, and slightly fearful I am of the unknown and uncertainty that's in the future.




Henrietta Harris morphs the shape of the face along with the hair in that section. The sense of self is changed in her drawings. Are they sad? confused? worried? Their faces don't display too much emotion but there is still something strong in the overall emotion emitted from the drawings. I use the hair in my portrait as a sort of personal shroud of doubt. Hair that is personal to me, constantly around. A hazy fog in limbo.

I started to think about what kind of medium I was going to use and I came across Bao Pham and David Rees. David's use of untraditional colors to paint faces was something I wanted to implement. The colorful shades of blues, pinks, and yellows in both the face and hair. I've started using prime colors in more of my art pieces. Bao Pham uses watercolor and is able to create a shroud, or cloudy/ misty appearance is the figure's hair he's painting. I tried to mix the watercolor and gouache colors together to maybe signify different emotions. Constantly turning, ever fleeting, different intensities all mixed together