Symbolic Self Portrait

Symbolic Self Portrait- Ellen Chapman

At first, I was hesitant on how I wanted to approach this assignment. My first initial instinct was to draw an actual “self portait” of my face and try to be true to myself physically and include drawings of my interests and hobbies. However, after researching some “symbolic self-portraits” I found that many of them didn’t contain a physical portrait of a person at all. Some that I was mostly drawn to were the contents of someone’s purse, or their bedside table. They illustrated objects that were drawn to represent the person as a whole not just physically. So I began to think about things or possessions I had that represent who I am or what matters to me. My first initial thought was my journals, or books. However, those represent my thoughts that are calculated and thought out. So I looked around my room and my eyes immediately went to an object I am always coming back to since this past August: my guitar.

            I started playing guitar my freshman year of high school. It was a spur of the moment decision, I was walking around some shops in suburban Pennslyvania, saw a guitar shop and spontaneously decided to buy one. Over a couple months, I picked up some chords here and there, but didn’t dedicate enough time to master it. Then high school began to pick up and the passion and desire to learn fizzled out.

            It wasn’t until the end of this summer, when I was going through major lifestyle changes, I decided to come back to the instrument as a means for distraction from the difficult parts of my life. I took my dusty guitar out of the basement of my home in Virginia, and brought it to sunny California. It was then I really began to dedicate time to learning. I watched youtube videos, spent hours every day practicing chord progressions and even began taking lessons from a friend. I found that when I was playing, I forgot about everything else I had going on in my life. All that mattered was the song I was trying to master, or the scale I was trying to learn. Guitar allows me to forget about the world, and focus on something beautiful and pure. Music. It is so special and absolutely integral to my happiness to this day, which is why I decided to choose my guitar to draw for my self-portrait.

            I chose charcoal as my medium because it is easily mallable and it allows you to add value without difficulty which mattered to me because that ties back into music as a whole. The white marks on the guitar represent soundwaves as I wanted to give it breadth and a musical quality. The examples I included below where some inpirations I found which relate back to using possessions as an expression of self.