PART FOUR: PROJECT: SELF PORTRAIT: Research Point

Like I mentioned earlier, I've been reading the National Portrait Gallery Insights book on Self Portraits by Liz Rideal. The most interesting bits for me were the explanations or interpretations of the artists' self portraits - vanity, self-promotion, self-mockery, self-discovery, etc. I'm interested in the idea that, in a self portrait you can be whoever you want to be, as well as who you truly are. There are so many possibilities.

Above, a very self-deprecatory self portrait of Edward Lear aged 73 with his cat. He was clearly OK with mocking himself, no need for fancy adornments...

Helen Chadwick's self portrait brings into focus the vanity of the artist. The feathers, the drapes and the naked breasts are all symbolic of self promotion and a showy nature, and the way she looks directly at herself in the mirror reminds us of the narcisist in many or all of us. But is this a kind of self mockery too...? Is she being tongue in cheek?

This is Rembrandt's depiction of himself as a young man - it's honest and simple, and in it you can see the older well known face he became.

I've never heard of Tara Mueller before but I found this while 'googling' - it's on her blog - and I thought it was great. It has humour as well as something of a 50s horror movie about it - really clever. You get a sense of the sort of person she might be - talented, but able to laugh at herself perhaps?

I really admire Freud's honest but intense painting style, he doesn't mess about.

I discovered this Jane Lewis portrait on Bridgeman Education and it caught my eye - not especially because it's an amazing painting in my opinion, but because of the repitition of circular shapes throughout - it's really nicely composed.

The book I mention above talks of the word 'vanitas', the Latin term associated with a fashionable genre of still lifes in the Netherlands in the 16th Century depicting in short, our mortality. It's a subject that everyone can relate to. I'd be interested in exploring this concept, having lost my father last year - especially as I think of him a lot when I think of creativity and my attempts at strengthening my own, because he was an artist and sculptor as well as a free spirit. It was effortless for him.