Symbolic Self Portrait - Marie Marchant

Marie Marchant

Cindy Rehm

Advanced Drawing

3/12/18

Symbolic Self Portrait

           

            Self Portraits are pieces of art I find incredibly strong works as well as difficult ones to make. Attempting to do a portrait is hard enough, encapsulating someone’s energy within a still photo. Nonetheless, managing to execute doing that for oneself is a whole other playing field. Yet there is something very interesting about self-portraits, it gives insight into how the artist thinks or feels about themselves. For my self-portrait, I decided to do something much more symbolic than purely representational-realistic-rendering. I chose to depict my self-portrait as a Polecat fighting a snake, framed by smoke or wave like patterning. The drawing is about 18” x 24” in an irregular shape. The drawing is all done in ink and pen on drawing paper. I was inspired to depict myself as an animal because I have always been interested in the comparison of human kind to animals. Humans have been making these connections and analogies throughout history, possibly as a way to better connect with the natural world around us. I specifically chose a Polecat because it has been showing up in my dreams as of recently. The snake I chose because it is another animal I often identify with, as well as in several cultures it represents change (a.k.a. shedding an old skin). I often struggle with change and opening new chapters in my life, as well as closing old ones. Therefore, I chose to represent the Polecat fighting or attacking the snake because that is something that I have been fighting and working on myself. I chose to frame the Polecat and snake with the smoke clouds or waves because I feel that it represents my style of artwork. More recently, I have been working with much more graphic and bold colors and lines. However, my previous style was much more detailed oriented and heavily black and white or muted colors. I chose to combine the graphic and detail qualities of my past works into this one, hopefully to create a stronger piece. As well as better represent my artistic style. My art is a large portion of my life and who I identify as, therefore I thought it was very important to try to represent myself stylistically in this piece.