Self-portraiture consistently informs the world, in concrete rather than abstract terms, of an artist's experience as the visual subject of her or his own work. Through making self-portraits, I am entering into this dialogue with other artists who are also engaged in self-portraiture. This dialogue is not limited to artists, any viewer can partake by viewing the work and relating to the self-discovery and processes an artist goes through to convey meaning about him or herself. While many view the self-portrait as a window into the mythologized personalities of artists like Vincent van Gogh, as being eccentric or mad, I believe this misconception to be too narrow of an interpretation. There are as many different types of self-portraiture as there are artists making them. Ideally speaking, through drawing myself I wish to portray many different inner-states, or abstracts of myself. Each portrait does not stand alone as a distinct and complete representation. They function more effectively if viewed together as an amalgam of what an ideal and true self-portrait could potentially embody.
At the beginning of this body of work, I was not studying other artist's self-portraiture. My influence began with Paula Rego because I was interested in pastel as a fast way to bring color to my work, and felt awed by her mastery of it. She is a contemporary painter, focusing the subject matter of her recent work on representing women in a fairytale framework. I wanted to draw myself as she drew her models. I started very big, working with pastel on 4x8 sheets of plywood. Drawing three images of myself in each panel, I referenced Rego's compositional structure and how she set her figures within space.
In her Dancing Ostriches series from 1995, she drew eight large pieces in pastel of figures of women dressed in black tutus and pink ballet slippers. In one of the drawings, a single figure fills up the entire picture plane in a confrontational and uncomfortable way. The figure is perching on a black leather cushion with her legs parallel to the bottom of the picture plane and her arms looming over her head at the top as if they are coming right out at the viewer. The application of the pastel is vigorous and emphasizes the body of the figure as being fundamentally strong. Rego's ballet dancers are not idealized female forms as Edgar Degas presented them to be in the nineteenth century.
In my work from the end of last year, I was looking at Rego carefully while working. In five large-scale pieces, my figures sit on and crouch beneath a ledge. Similar to Rego's, my figures feel pressed up against the picture plane forcing the boundary of the image to exceed its natural dimensions. In addition, I attribute the way I draw my body to her style of distorting certain parts and putting less of an emphasis on others. The distortion in my pieces tends to be in the lower half of the body emphasizing the hips and thighs.
In part, I got this from Rego and from observing myself in the mirror and focusing on the areas where I feel the most strength but also vulnerability. Historically, many considered these parts of the female figure to house strength for things once desirable like fertility. This is no longer true in contemporary society and culture, which is thin-obsessed. I am drawn to Rego for directly challenging these ideals by depicting women in traditionally romantic states, such as dancers or in repose, and redefining this iconography by distorting their bodies and presenting them as animal like. Another body of work she made in the same medium and scale as the dancers was entitled Dog Women, stressing the physicality and fierceness of her female figures, and again defying the ideal.
In an effort to reduce the formula of drawing myself and to get away from the dilemma of the body, I began to concentrate my attention on the traditional self-portrait format of head and shoulders. I discovered a great deal from that transition. I found that I could focus much more on actual content and technique without having to worry about just getting the ground covered like in the larger work. Issues started arising in terms of composition and what made it in the picture. The work made from this point on is in pastel, charcoal and acrylic on paper. My figure generally takes up most of the picture plane and varies from life-size to larger. A commonality that carries through the work is the visual formula of capturing a frozen moment, or abstract, of myself through which I see an inner state coming through. Through research, I first looked back to artists like, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, and Gustave Courbet to see what they were implementing in their self-portraiture.
Initially, what was coming out of my work was unclear, but I continued with the idea that I was capturing different states of being or abstracts of myself. Recently there was a traveling exhibition of Rembrandt's self-portraits and I began researching his work in this area. Rembrandt, working in the 17th century, painted over seventy portraits of himself within a span of forty years. Throughout these works, he sometimes assumed various mythic or biblical roles and adopted costume in his paintings. I was interested in the results he got from this in terms of what he conveyed to his audience about himself.
In one particular piece, The Prodigal Son, Rembrandt paints himself raising a glass of wine towards the viewer with a female figure seated on his leg. The carelessness he conveys about his character and the wantonness is palpable. I wanted to evoke the same intense states of being within my work without having to adopt different costumes or characters. Without drastically changing these elements in my work, I had facial expression, composition, color, and other pictorial elements left to convey to an audience the mood I intended. Often times I am unaware of the state I am portraying until after I have completed a piece and I can interpret it according to these elements.
For example, in my piece Self-Portrait: Fever I worked under a red light, which created a pink tone cast over my face, mimicking a flushed look. After seeing the effect of this, I saw my head leaned into the side of the picture plane, my mouth was slightly open, and my eyes were startlingly wide. After I got some distance from the work, with time, this analysis matured. I formulated a title that aided in revealing my discovery more directly to the audience. The reading is also dependent on the audience's interpretation and whether or not they can somehow relate to and accept the state the artist created. Ideally, I want the audience to access sensations evoked from my drawings and to react to the subtlety that comes through an image about what it means to inhabit a body from within.
Naturally with my interest in self-portraiture, I turned to Vincent van Gogh. He painted over forty in the last five years of his life, from 1885 to 1890. Throughout my research, I became interested in the self-searching that van Gogh maintained throughout his entire life. This is evident through the records of his letters to his brother and patron, Theo van Gogh. Mostly I find affinity with his spiritual search for a higher purpose for living. He devoted much of his life to studying for the priesthood, working in poor mining communities in France, as well as working as an apprentice to art dealers. He painted the last ten years of his life and I see his work coming out of this spiritual search, as do other theologians and historians (Edwards). I view each self-portrait I make as a deeper spiritual questioning of who and what I am. While not sharing van Gogh's mental state, I do identify with his spiritual state, towards which I hope to develop my own path. In drawing myself repeatedly, I am seeking a more substantial understanding of what my humanness means in relation to the world, both concrete and spiritual.
About his piece Self-Portrait for my Friend Paul Gaugin, he writes, "I have aimed at the character of a simple bonze worshiping the eternal Buddha" (Erpel, 60). I have similar motives driving my self-portraiture. In my earlier work, the ledge I spoke of is a metaphor for a spiritual plane that I find myself both on and simultaneously falling off of, and that is why there is always one figure that is lying on the floor in a desperate state. Van Gogh also writes while in St. Remy the mental hospital, "I am working like mad and feel a blind rage to work more than ever. And I believe that this will contribute to my recovery" (Erpel, 9). I view my self-portraiture in this vein; as a way to heal the broken and negative regard, which I can hold for myself, the uncertainty with which I can exist.
For more visual and less personal reasons I next began to look at Gustave Courbet's self-portraiture. In historian Michael Fried's book Courbet's Realism, he discusses what Courbet conveys through composition and the use of hands in his self-portraits. In my piece Self-Portrait: Essentials, I crop myself at the shoulders but include my left hand at the lower left corner coming up with my wrist bent. My intentions were to focus on the hand because it holds importance for me as an artist. In the painting, I am actually holding a small eraser. Through my reading on Courbet, I felt an affinity with what Fried was saying about his hands. He writes, "Courbet's drawing of his hand expresseshis conviction of being one with his body, of inhabiting it from within" (Fried, 73). This embodiedness in Courbet's self-portraits that Fried emphasizes is what I intend to portray in my work. However, he seems to be limiting it to a physical feeling of what it means to inhabit a body, whereas I wish to include the emotional and mental as well as physical states in my redefinition of what it means to be self-embodied.
Fried suggests that Courbet's use of cropping in his later self-portraits, like in The Man with the Leather Belt, creates the illusion that the bottom half of the figure is coming out of the picture plane and entering the space of the viewer. Therefore, the viewer reads the top half of the figure, which is actually painted, as closer to the picture plane creating a sense of proximity. This is also evident in my work. My intentions are for a viewer to feel confronted just as I am confronting myself in the mirror. This use of space is also effective for my desire to depict internal states of being, to mimic the scrutiny of emotional analysis.
In my recent piece Self-Portrait: Pledge, of head and shoulders, my head faces left and my left hand rises from the bottom of the picture, as if taking an oath. The tension of the space created by the cropping does make for a directness and proximity that is rather uncomfortable. In addition, the hand and arm come forward from the head as though they are actually crossing over the picture plane to the space of the viewer. The hand then acts as a barrier between the viewer and the head and shoulders. This element was not intentional at first but seems a logical progression in terms of protecting myself from others seeing me. It reflects the discomfort that arises when looking at myself so closely in the mirror and attempts to refuse that the viewer achieve this closeness.
Recently in my research of other artists' self-portraiture, I have found several women artists that I respect a great deal and in many ways, I wish to emulate their path and grow towards the precedents they have set. Before these most recent discoveries, I searched through catalogues of women's self-portraiture rebelliously discounting a great deal of it for its emphasis on "woman" and its de-emphasis on a common human struggle.
However, my attitude was one of denial and closed-mindedness because it is impossible for me to assert that my self-portraiture has nothing to do with my experience as a woman. Through devoting this year to self-portraiture, I feel more secure in the self-expression that has emerged from this group of work. I am less concerned with evading the fact that I am a woman engaged in exploring the complexities of the self, of which I have only scratched the surface. Every experience, especially visual, ties into my gender, whether I am aware of it or not. However, the gender issue is not the sole impetus driving my work.
The first of these artists is Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist living and working in her homeland in the first half of the twentieth century during both World Wars. Her self-portraiture acts like bookends for her artistic career, done early and late, couching a great deal of politically charged graphic work in between. Particularly her black and white self-portraiture done later on is very influential in terms of its visual presence and the heaviness of her experience expressed through it. By the very nature of the time in which she lived, Kollwitz' self-portraiture reflects the struggle she endured including the loss of her only son in WWI.
I recently completed works in black and white and I find it interesting to witness the directness that this adds to my work in terms of conveying emotion. Kollwitz was aware of the power that black and white holds in terms of making strong statements and carried this over into her self-portraits. A guttural seriousness and thorough honesty that come out of my portraits in black and white, which seem to be lacking in other color ones. This may be in part due to the fact that I am not well versed in color, but I am not going to abandon color altogether in my work. There are some things that I can communicate in black and white more effectively than in color. I believe that for me, as I see in Kollwitz' self-portraits, the decision to use black and white matches the gravity of depicting inner states of being. Color can be superficial and attract a viewer without focusing as much as black and white has to on subject matter, composition, and contrast. Black and white work seems to exit our world and enter a different reality or more specifically a spiritual realm.
To bring it back full circle to contemporary work, Susanna Coffey uses her self-portraits to generate a similar content that I am trying to evoke. Her selective cropping includes only her head and sometimes shoulders, which fill the canvas with her presence to a monumental extent. By making my work sometimes larger than life-size, I am creating images that can produce a similar effect for a viewer. This selective cropping points back to the process an artist goes through in choosing what to reveal. Especially for the female self-portrait, this is an extremely relevant area of discussion because she is revealing herself visually while controlling the gaze, often defined as male by Linda Nochlin and other historians. The female artist working in self-portraiture or in portraits of other women is working up hill against centuries of representation of the female form and persona by predominately male artists ( Nochlin).
I believe that I crop my pictures for similar reasons subconsciously especially since I was previously making self-portraits of my entire figure with minimal clothing, and then came back to the head and shoulders. I felt more comfortable with this selective cropping because I did not have to present myself as a woman or as a female figure in art, historically read in a sexual way. A much longer discussion could go on about why the female body acts as a sexual object. I will leave this out because it has not been a primary issue through the development of my self-portraits.
Coffey's work is also inspiring because the artist succeeds so profoundly in forcing the viewer to see her as she sees herself (Kraus, Art in America). She plays with costume, specifically hats and glasses to present herself as anything from playful to fearful. She controls her appearance, the framework, the setting, and the outcome. Her tight execution of portraying herself is impressive. Even though her gaze does not alter much, she usually looks out at the viewer, who can read distinct emotions from different works. In this way, she captures the state of mind or inner portrait rather than just her likeness. This is exactly the goal that I am struggling to achieve and one that will probably take a lifetime to attain.
Another contemporary painter that I admire deeply is Tina Newberry. Her recent body of work titled Bonnie Lasses contains many small-scale self-portraits in which she appears in various poses and characters. Some qualities that are contained in her work are lacking in my own, however I see myself working toward the direction she has set in my mind. The title of the body of work, based in her Scottish lineage, is in a way a joke but simultaneously one reads a deep longing for a connection with her heritage because of the beauty with which she executes the paintings (Newberry et al.). In her self-portrait, Agnes Irwin, she paints herself in traditional head and shoulders format with a plaid sash draped across her chest. Her gaze is not light but rather contemplative and drawn back as though she is awkwardly questioning you looking at her. Despite this, there is an air of assertion, with her glasses on and hair drawn back, that comes through. She is making a stark statement about who she is or how she sees herself at that moment. In addition, her style of painting is so beautiful and refined capturing highlights and shadows, which heighten the reading of the gaze by forcing a viewer to see the formal and emotional elements juxtaposed so eloquently.
In my recent piece Self-Portrait: Flower, I have similar formal elements at work that Newberry executes with such skill. Although my portrait is in black and white whereas hers is in color, I have adopted a similar attitude to her in presenting this image of myself. I am in head and shoulders format with my left hand placed over my left eye, my hair drawn back, and a flower in the right hand corner. What I find strong is that even though my hand is blocking half of my face, the gaze is impenetrable and assertive and demands recognition. I wish to evoke softness through the line and mark of the pastel and charcoal, which play against the sanded surface of the paper. The graininess that emerges creates a softness and almost windblown quality that comes through in the gesture of the mark. The strength of the gaze coupled with the quietness of the mark complicates the reading similar to Newberry.
Throughout my study of self-portraiture and working inside its framework I have discovered more about fitting into a genre and being driven to create work that both finds its roots and looks toward a future. Through drawing myself, I feel that I have achieved an understanding of the complexity of figuration by turning it in on myself. I believe that I have a deeper association with self-portraiture and the dialogue that it creates with other artists as well as an audience. Reviewing my work as a body is helpful in terms of seeing what I choose to portray of myself consistently and what surprises surfaced. Important elements include selective cropping, conveying inner-states or abstracts of myself, and including actual or sensed barriers between the viewer and me.
My intentions for future work include drawing others as well as myself and I believe that my sensitivity to technical as well as personal issues that arise when creating a portrait will benefit future work. I will continue my decisions to control what the viewer sees and to create portraits of inner states of being. Discoveries made through observing other women artists currently working in this area will ignite other elements to bring into my work as well.

Bradley, Fiona, Victor Willing, Ruth Rosengarten, and Judith Collins. Paula Rego. NY:
Thames and Hudson Tate Gallery Publishing, 1997.

Edwards, Cliff. Van Gogh and God: a creative spiritual quest. Chicago: Loyola
University Press, 1989.

Erpel, Fritz. Van Gogh The Self-Portraits. Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic
Society LTD., 1963.

Fetch, Tom. Käthe Kollwitz: Works in Color. NY: Schocken Books, 1988.

Fried, Michael. Courbet's Realism. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1990.

Krauss, Nicole. "Susanna Coffey at Tibor de Nagy." Art in America. September. 1999.

Newberry, Tina. Recent Paintings by Tina Newberry. February. 2001
http://www.missioncreep.com/newberry/

Nochlin, Linda. Women Art and Power and Other Essays. "Why there are No Great
Women Artists." Boulder: Westview Press, 1988.

White, Christopher, and Quentin Buvelot. Rembrandt by Himself. London: National
Gallery Publications Limited, 1999.

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