6. Self Portrait
(11/4/23) 







Today I worked at home again and attempted a different direction with my painting and decided to try to paint a self portrait of sorts from a picture I had taken of myself. Not out of vanity but out of curiosity of how I would interpret a camera interpretation of me and how I would react to having a reference point to draw and paint from as I am usually very process driven and in the moment when creating, only taking time to step back and look at my progress rather than looking at references. I liked the picture I took of myself as I had a clay face cleaning product on the it Accentuated parts of my face and made very interesting lines and I wanted to try and translate this to a semi proportionally abstracted piece. And if it weren’t for the face cleaning product I wouldn’t have take the photograph. So I got my roll of calico and primed it with white emulsion then set to work trying to get the basic lines down on the calico using charcole and a yellow pastel, drawing from the reference picture on my phone. After I managed to get the basic shape of the face I wanted I made lines with red wax crayon on the outside that gave an energy to the background the piece rather than having this head shape floating in nothing there was something for it to hang in and be accentuated by. Especially the mix of yellow, red and white was very pleasing to my eye.
Below are pictres of the reference picture I used of myself and the piece.
I took a bit of time to consider my next advance on the self portrait, and decided I needed to add a colour to the face but I did not want it to be a skin tone so I took from the reference image the grey colour from the face wash I had on, so I decided to paint the face grey. I spent a lot of time mixing and applying grey to the painting because I wanted some areas to be lighter and some darker. Purely to be able to have some contrast in the face and add more depth, which I feel I managed to do. Pictures of this below.
While creating this painting I had Pablo Picasso’s work on my mind, and wanted to in some way emulate the energy and abstraction he had in his work. I feel as if I did capture this very slightly, but not to a full extent. I feel I achieved this as the head and jaw look to be out of synch with one another, as if the jaw is facing straight on and from the nose upwards is twisted to the viewers left. This gives the painting an odd feel as the facial features are not exactly where they should be or are enlarged. I feel like this is due in part to the scale of this painting (metre squared calico) as the larger scale adds the difficulty of scaling up especially when my reference picture is on my phone , but I feel these small mistakes in scaling, proportion and facial direction add to the life of the piece as it is not straight forward and I found myself wondering why I was drawn to the parts that didn’t look right, and it is because they don’t look right that it feels so intriguing.
Below I will attatch some portraits created by Pablo Picasso to illustrate my point of inspiration and what informed my work.
These examples illustrate my point as there is either complete abstraction of a face, abstraction in the middle as the head seems to have been shaved off and pointed and facial proportions played with, then this is the case with the top one also but I mix of abstractions, and the first images nose seems to bare similarity with the nose in my painting, but this was not a conscious taking. Also the colour schemes of these works with yellow and red pallets used in some and some similar colours that compliment each other.
More Later
Lots Of Love
John Hancock X
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