Portraits of the Self

 
     
     Self portraits have never really been something I enjoyed drawing, I barely like the way I look and trying to recreate myself through a drawing or painting it doesn't really resonate well. I'm talking more about the traditional style of self portraits, where it must capture your likeness by just actually looking exactly like you. Whether it'd be myself or someone else's self portrait, I find that they tend to be boring. I do find the more expressionistic approach to a self portrait, where it plays more with the idea of how you feel you look like. It's definitely more stylistic and it conveys much more through the colors and shapes used.

Bernard Buffet

Lucian Freud

Bryan Charnley

Bryan Charnley

     Bryan Charnley was a schizophrenic which makes for a very interesting self portrait because, well he's a schizo. There's a lot more to take away from these pieces and it's a shit ton more fun to look at. 

Rafael Zabaleta

Micheal Landy
  Landy has a unique feel to his work. While I personally feel that his portraits are pretty underwhelming, his following work does a lot of interesting things with lines and shapes. The first two pictures look very similiar sharing the same pile-of-trash look and it looks as if one was made right after the other. Each line either directs you to another one and eventually ends in a circle with some more lines.

His choice to stick to black and white feels very right, where if color where added to pictures like the third one, I feel it'd be a little too much for the eyes where the simplicity of the B&W makes it feel like a cluttered newspaper of advertisements.

  Landy also did an interesting project (link below) where he has this giant glass trash bin where he throws in a bunch of various drawings and paintings. His reasoning being is that after they're thrown in, they stop being individual pieces of art and start being one large art piece. The idea is premise is pretty interesting, however the execution was a little meh. I thought it was pretty stupid to just trash so much art (I guess that was the point though) and I feel it would've been more interesting if they have made a large culmination of all the works and got across the same idea while still keeping the idea.






https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EqVPZwiT5Q