My advanced painting class took on self-portraiture lately-- and as you might expect in an advanced level class, most of the finished works were very innovative with the concept. I, however, was completely stuck-- at least, at first. Then I began to think about how I could best serve my work. I realized I wanted to make a project that was both derivative of, and a vacation from, my grant project. So I thought about the elements of my grant project that were interesting to me. Characters rendered at different levels of representational realism and manipulation of imagery felt like the most important. This led me to using mirrors in my work, because I felt like the struggle between person/reflection related to the struggle between musician/painting of musician. This is what I made:
Here I was envisioning myself standing in front of a self portrait drawing and thinking about how to explore that idea. The mirrored panels in my studio have a seam running down the center, and I thought about how that fault line interrupted a reflected image. This painting was made on two panels. Leaning them up against the mirror to photograph them gave me the idea to photograph them at different angles against the mirror, and with other artwork, to see what I'd come up with.
These are some of my favorite variations on these portraits. I later collaged a bunch of these photographs onto a board, and painted on top of everything. The result looked painterly, was rich in manipulation and imagery, and played with ideas of reality and representation.
I felt like this work was successful, and I'm definitely not done with the idea of mirrors. But I love that I never would have made this painting without my grant project, and I wouldn't have made the strides I had on my grant pieces without this painting.
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