Self Portraits from the week of Feb 2nd

 Here are two self portraits from this week. To explain, these start off as short 15 minute sketches at the start of each class. I try to keep them simple and let whatever, if any, ideas come to mind no matter how intangible or abstract they may be. Then just piece it together as I go.

Random Self Portrait - Jan 20th

Project 1 : Fears

This is a depiction of me. An altered photograph used to represent some key fears.

I will start with an introduction to myself.

I was raised in New York and moved to WA when I was 21. I'm an art student with aspirations to teach. I work as a content analyst for an international company.

Onto fears, a few of which I shared in my self portrait above. Some of these are obviously fears, others are points of life that create anxiety or worrying when they arise. These feelings are just fears manifesting themselves in new forms.

1. Time (represented by the clock): I fear mortality but have no desire for immortality. My mind sinks into this stasis of time left unchanging and when glimpses of time's passage become too hard to ignore I get nervous or fearful.
2. Ties (represented by the scissors): I'm a hoarder of emotions. Though externally I'm often minimalistic and simple, internally I'm wrought with strong feelings that I struggle to know how best to show. I fear cutting these ties so I hoard the emotions until they feel stifling with only words to express them. Even simpler forms of affection are hard for me to show. My words and art are sometimes by best outlet.
3. Sense of self (as represented by the face) : I worry about losing myself in the intensity of the world. At moments life can seem overbearing or overwhelming.

Other fears...not represented above:

4.  Losing those close to me.
5. Failing to succeed in life. Though I feel little stress about small failures, there is a strong internal pressure driving me to be better on a broader scale.
6. Failing at love...not finding it or being alone, those don't worry me. But to find love and to make such damaging mistakes that I lose it, that is what scares me.
7. Not understanding people. Some thing I'm intuitive about people, perhaps I am, but I'd guess it's more of a desperate desire to understand other people so as to feel less isolated from them. It's hard to understand other people, when you add in boundaries and defenses and social expectations...people become obscured and hard to know.
8. As a counter to #7 getting too close to people, for the opposite reason. I reserve much of myself out of fear that at close examination, proof might become evident that I'm different. A sense of community on a localized level isn't as important to me as a sense of normalcy and similarity in the bigger picture.
9. Self - Esteem. I doubt I'm alone in struggling with physical self confidence. It's a battle between a logical argument that I could be doing more to meet the general median of attractiveness that the world has momentarily deemed necessary versus the internal desire to just accept myself and be content with it. If anyone knows the trick to this, I'd be much indebted if you'd share it.
10. Not being good. Good in the altruistic sense. All the classic boyhood ideas of knights in shining armor and heros of legend apply here. Like good versus evil.

Tomorrow this will be presented. I will be nervous, likely turn red, and will be uncomfortable. And I'll be that this discomfort is one of the learning steps to the class. Will I like it...No. Will I grow from it. Probably.

January 4th

My first self portrait in what sounds like the first of many during my Reconstructing Self class...a humbling and exploratory look at self through art. In the first 15 minutes we were asked to draw a portrait of ourselves. This portrait is a simply rendered head shot.

Pros: Capture key features and overall form in a good time

Cons: Lacks bold lines or creativity

Below are some more interesting pieces of work that we did to address concepts using simple marks.

Reconstruction

A class I'm taking requires what looks like will make for a great sketch/project blog. So here goes.