So for the past few weeks I've been all-consumed with myself. Literally. In my painting class we had an assignment to paint a self-portrait, and not necessarily to just paint a literal representation of our face, just a self-portrait however we interpreted it. I did choose to paint my face, but part of that was a desire to academically paint a portrait with oils, which I had never done before. But regardless, this painting was the hardest thing I've ever done. We had weeks to work on it, and I sketched, and planned and thought, and filled up pages and pages in my sketchbook trying to settle on a composition, on an idea. I did want to simply paint my face, but beyond that I didn't want this to be an academic painting. I wanted to paint me. Which ultimately happens no matter what you paint. It's impossible to no put yourself into your work, but regardless, I wanted there to be more depth and meaning than the paintings I had done previously for classes. So I over-thought it to the extreme. So finally, a week before critique I settled on a composition. It took blocking in a few different ideas onto the canvas to get there, but I made it. So that week, literally all I did was paint. Every night I was up until the wee hours of the morning working on this stupid painting. I skipped classes the day before and the day of the critique in order to complete it to a point where I felt comfortable showing it. So anyway, I just wanted to show all 8 readers of my blog what I did. Because I am proud. It still needs work, but I'm happy with how it turned out.
So if you'll notice, the last photograph of the painting I have eyebrows, while the other ones don't. So as I was driving the painting to school a week ago for the critique after feverishly painting for a week straight, I realized I had forgotten to paint eyebrows and proceeded to burst into hysterical, crazy-person laughter. But at this point I said forget it and kept driving. So then that day we didn't get to my painting, we ran out of time, but again, even with time to add eyebrows I decided to leave it as is. But then this afternoon after I took pictures of the painting, on a whim pulled out a brush and added the eyebrows. I still don't know how I feel about them. Anyway, so this is my work, and hopefully I'll stay on top of things and at the end of the semester I'll keep all 8 of you updated on what else I do.
The end.
P.S. I realize my hair isn't actually that red. I really did try to match my hair color, but this has happened in every single self-portrait I have ever done. I think subconsciously I just think my hair is redder than it is. And I think I'm ok with this.
