ADVANCED DRAWING: Alter Ego

Prior to the alter ego project, I’d already been thinking about two facets/contributing factors to my personality so when it came time for the project things clicked right away. While I was home over winter break I read my Grandma Nike’s biography (The Woman With the Artistic Brush). I never knew either of my grandparents very well, and though he raised me I was never very close with my father either so the book was an interesting way to connect with my family history and put thought behind why I’m where I am now. The book was enlightening in a few regards, I’d always known that my Grandma came up from nothing, but I’d never known the extent of her enterprise. Additionally, I’d always known my polygamous Grandfather was no friend to women- but never to what extent. In the process of reflecting I couldn’t help but think about how the events that played out in their lives and the way they had each lived their lives, respectively, had filtered down into my life. The resulting thought process was sort of just viewing them and gendered figures in my life on a binary. Positive energy and a lot of (not all) of my positive traits had been passed down the line through female figures (my mom, my grandmother) and my negative traits or the negative aspects in my life have been moved down through the paternal line. With this project I aimed to place myself in the context of my grandparents work through the use of two self portraits placed in reimaginings of their pieces, “Masked Ceremony” and “Access of Hope”. In my grandfather’s piece, the portrait is done in my own style rather than his, so as to feel out of place, and has this intense sense of anxiety about his expression (brow furrowed, mouth agape). This anxiety is parallel to the sense of anxiety I feel about contextualizing myself against the men who came before me. While I consider the second picture a bit of a failure, the portrait has this calm and peace to it that is very similar to the portrait it’s been modified from. The two have taught me very different sides of being an artist. My grandfather (as well as my father) presented raw talent and emotion as the way to be a real artist, his work was beautiful, but he left it at artist and had a hard time marketing himself as soon as he left Nigeria. My grandmother however presented nothing but work ethic. She wears her hair bald because she used to carry concrete on her head for money, and over time she went bald in the spot where it made contact. Also she got out from under my grandfather’s hold, built her own house in secret, and then eventually built 4 galleries across Nigeria. As well as built a school for young artists, The Nike Center for Art and Culture. Reading her book was fascinating because I had never known an artist in my personal life to be that business minded, everything was driven by money but she still made beautiful work.