Warning! I’m about to make an absolute and dogmatic statement:
Everything is a Self-Portrait.
Think of people you know: their clothes offer us a self-portrait revealing their tastes, their personalities, their histories and stories. Their homes, their jobs; their sets of friends; their voices, their smells: Everything is a Self-Portrait. Friend A would never, ever wear those clothes that fit Friend B so well. Friend C smells of garlic and cigarettes, friend D of toothpaste and oh-I-hate-garlic-so-much. Toothpaste is a Self-Portrait, Therefore Everything is a Self-Portrait.
Point taken!
With some training, you can see a work of art for the first time and know, know, know exactly who created it: Rembrandt, Picasso, Matisse, O’Keefe; the painting’s subject is immaterial; Picasso’s work doesn’t look like O’Keefe’s, and vice versa; Picasso’s famous drawing of Igor Stravinsky could be called “Picasso’s Self-Portrait, in the guise of Stravinsky.”
My recent birthday coincided with a session of my Drawing Lab. I thought I’d have fun at my own expense—probably the best way to celebrate any one thing, and particularly one’s own birthday. I told my students that they’d draw nothing but portraits of me, me, ME! I’d do quick poses (for quick don’t-think-drawings), slow poses, poses wearing strange garments. And we’d also copy or transform or maim photos of me as a child, as an adolescent, as a young man holding a Siamese cat. Plus, we’d take works of art by canonical artists and use them as a “background canvas” on which we’d draw my portrait.
Yes, you guessed it right: my students inevitably drew their own self-portraits. And you also guessed right: their drawings all capture some dimension of me, some detail or some echo of some essence, some je-ne-sais-quoi (which is French for “you don’t quite look like Gregory Peck or Paul Newman, did you know that, Pedro? Didn’t you know that plastic surgery wasn’t going to help you, far from it? You took out a BANK LOAN from a SHARK???? And THOSE are the RESULTS of the SURGERY??????”).
Two of my students are brother and sister—I mean, not little kids but grown-ups, so-called! They compete; say no more! I’ll call them “B” and “K.” And I myself am called “P.” On my birthday Drawing Lab I too drew self-portraits (which were self-portraits, inevitably). I’ll ask my wife if I’m a grown-up, and one day I’ll spin her answer into a blog post or lullaby. Or dirge, depending on what she says.
Here’s my adolescent self. From left to right, the original (“O”), then K, B, and P.
Here’s my portrait as inspired by a Matisse drawing.
Forty years ago, holding my late mother’s late cat.
The German artist Georg Baselitz is famous for painting and drawing upside-down portraits. I offered my students an upside-down photo of my sweet self as a canvas.
To a portrait by Rembrandt I layered an image of myself kinda dressed like an old lady wearing a shawl.
Another student is called “M.”Guess who she drew on my birthday! The slide show includes a couple of clues. You’ll know exactly who she drew.
What can you learn from these birthday hallucinations?
Don’t take yourself too seriously.
People look at you, and without realizing it they create, in their minds, their own self-portrait “as you.”
You do the same thing, all the time! Your thoughts, images, memories, and opinions are all self-portraits in a vast Subjective Museum With a Musty Basement Prone to Frequent Flooding.
Highly developed art skills won’t save you from drawing inevitable self-portraits. “Remember Rembrandt.”
Gregory Peck probably didn’t take himself too seriously.
You don’t look like Gregory Peck.
Neither did Paul Newman.
©2024, Pedro de Alcantara