Welcome to the second entry of my art blog!
It's been more than a week since the first entry, but hopefully you don't mind too much and will find it interesting and/or helpful in some capacity.
If you have any suggestions for entries, or
if you want me to talk about something specific, please do not hesitate
to let me know by commenting here, by DMing me on my instagram (here) or emailing me (here).
Today I will muse about self-portraiture, which is something I've been doing a lot since moving to New York in 2013. Before moving here, even when I did use a picture of myself as reference for a drawing, I was pretty adamant about how it was not a self-portrait, even if by definition it absolutely was a self-portrait. I suppose I didn't *see* myself in those and wasn't trying to draw myself.
I have the hypothesis I started self-portraits when I moved here because I wanted to see myself with my own eyes in this city, because I couldn't believe it.
After maybe sort of starting to believe it, the self-portraits also started getting an introspective layer to them.
The first deep conversation I had with myself about being a woman and confronting abuse happened with the series of self-portraits as a victim, you can see that work on my website (here).
With that series of drawings I talked with myself about how scared/uncomfortable I felt and didn't realize it until more than a year later, how unsafe I was, how bizarre everything felt, how I also felt confused because there were still some very enjoyable moments. Moments that even now I remember as fun.
Then I thought about other romantic relationships I had, what I thought I had to do "as a woman". In arguments, in sex, in the relationship, vs what I actually want for myself in those aspects and what I really think is a nice, healthy relationship.
Around the time I was producing this work, I read Perez Gauli's book "El cuerpo en venta", which is in Spanish and I don't know if it's translated, but it talks a little about women using portraiture to take back ownership of ourselves, or just find who we are, because we've sort of had that dictated for us. Here is a PDF in Spanish of the book, not sure about whether it's available in English, but I also haven't looked super hard.
After having dealt with that stuff, I've kept making self portraits. Sometimes the self-portrait is so I can see myself as something cool and strong (like in my drawing "Self-portrait as Baphomet", or "Self-portrait as a Banshee"), or to study the nuance of my own face/body (like in my drawing "Self-portrait Mask" or "Self-portrait as Venus").
An artist I love the shit out of is Anne Harris, whose oeuvre revolves mostly around self-portraiture, and just makes amazing imagery. Check out her paintings (here).
Here is a link to the wikipedia article on the self-portraiture for kicks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-portrait.
Thanks for reading and please let me know your thoughts on self-portraiture, and let me know if you'd like me to write about something specific. Cheers!
