A Series of Self-Portraits

Selfie, is a series of self-portrait drawings and paintings. When completed, my series will include a combined sixteen drawings and paintings portraying themes of identity. In this work I will explore the tension between the authentic and the ideal in contemporary self-representation.

Working in a traditional style and media, I hope to show how our contemporary dialogue around selfie culture mirrors historic understanding of truth in representational art. Specifically, my work recalls 19th century Naturalism and the art of Cecilia Beaux, Elizabeth Jane Gardner and Ilya Repin. Influenced by both the Realist and Neoclassical schools of art, these artists’ works negotiate a visual and conceptual understanding of truth.

The era of smartphones has enabled the general population to capture almost every aspect of their lives and share them instantaneously with a global audience. A visual product of this evolution is the selfie, a self-portrait taken with an individual’s camera phone and shared to social media. Associated with “real life” and “live” access the selfie is praised for its authenticity.

Social media apps like instagram stress the importance of authenticity through their design: Instagram users can only upload photos through their personal phone. My own process reflects this devotion to the authentic.

Done in a traditional figurative style my art prioritizes accuracy and is done working directly from life using a mirror. This choice to work from life gives each work unique temporal boundaries. Throughout the series I explore the relationship between time and essence of being. Paintings with a looser brush handling were done in as little as one sitting and represent specific and fluid moments of being. In contrast those works that show more finished style were done over several weeks and reflect a more general and fixed state. In this way the work negotiates ideas of the subconscious and external selves.

Almalia Ulman’s critique of Selfie

Despite this sense of authentic reality the selfie is criticized for depicting an idealised version of oneself. Social media “influencers” are accused of composing and curating their identity to show a more perfect version of themselves. Amalia Ulman‘s Instagram series “Excellences & Perfections” highlights the performative nature of selfie culture. In her photo essay she satirises how femininity is often depicted on social media while simultaneously throwing into question the role of authenticity in selfie culture. By creating an alternative identity through her instagram account Ulman makes evident the staging that goes into a selfie. Her work highlights the imbalance between the time spent constructing an image and the sense of immediacy that the photographic medium suggests.

Like the selfies that Ulman critiques, my own work requires a certain amount of construction. To best express the central idea of each work I control my costume, pose and expression. What separates my work from Ulman and the selfie is my choice to employ a traditional time consuming method to capture my images. Working from life means that I face and stay with that staging for the longer time of creation. Spending anywhere from six hours to six weeks on a single image means that each selfie becomes a kind of authentic lived experience.

Exploration of Personal Style

The proliferation of selfie images was aided by the introduction of the reverse camera on cell phones. This reverse camera replicates the experience of looking into a mirror. My own selfies are done using a mirror (instead of a photo image). I’m interested in the association between mirrors and self discovery.

By limiting myself to a single subject composition, marks and material became the central focus of the work. In this way the series becomes a way to expand my artistic style. I push myself to experiment and try new approaches with each piece. As the series progressed I found myself carrying forward certain choices. These choices have slowly culminated into the emergence of a new style. By presenting the viewer with a series of impressions about my personality, this work actively demonstrates the progression, evolution, and establishment of my style and identity as a painter.

The time spent on the creation of each image provides a space for self exploration and development. I invite the viewer to look beyond the subject of the work and consider this series as an expression of experience opposed to a statement of identity.

The first time I saw John Singer Sargent’s Madame X I didn’t get it. I thought, what a boring painting to have caused a scandal. Recently, I ran into an image of the painting on a book cover. At the time, I was perusing the library for material on the use of the profile in Florentine portrait art. Staring down at Madame X with her face turned away in profile I murmured, “genius.”

(Two people turned to stare.)

A Profile Portrait of Madame Gautrau

The portrait depicting the Parisian socialite, Madame Gautreau, was originally debuted at the 1884 Paris Salon, instantly sparking scandal. The work’s controversy can be understood by examining Gautreau’s contrapposto pose which presents herself as both a Lady and an odalisque. As the art critic Susan Sidlauskas writes, “Gautreau’s tensed body challenged the entire cultural history of how a woman should pose.”

In profile, Gautreau asserts her virtue and social standing. The significance of the profile dates back to the Renaissance, first popularized in the portrayal of Florentine Noble women. Pictorially, the profile was used to keep a safe distance between a Lady and her viewer. Because she looks away the viewer assumes she is unaware of its gaze (and presumably her own beauty), therefore preserving a sense of the sitter’s modesty and humility. Over time the profile entered the lexicon of painting and came to signify a woman’s virtue and social status as a Lady.

Although her head is in profile, Gautreau seems to twist her torso into a frontal position offering a full view of her body. The pose suggests that while she plays the part of a Lady, Gautreau is active in the seduction of her audience.

What’s not properly understood in our contemporary age is that female nudity portrayed in classical art was considered different to actual female nakedness. It was seen as improper to portray the naked body of a real woman. By in large, nudes were of mythical subjects and it was understood that the artist was not working from a live model but an interpretation of classic Greek sculpture. These depictions were rationalized as a philosophic expression of beauty through the depiction of geometric harmony of the human form.

Actual women were still portrayed much like they were during the Renaissance  – showcasing their virtue and humility.

So Sargent’s depiction of a real woman, of high standing no less, actively presenting herself to be admired was in fact very radical for its time.

To underscore the subject’s agency she wears a pendant with the symbol of the Roman goddess of hunt Diana. In the original version, the strap pinned to the dress by the pendant of the huntress falls from her shoulder. The implication of the fallen strap was so damning that Sargent eventually repainted that portion of the work showing the strap in place on her shoulder.

Sargent’s Painting Interrogates Beauty

Examining Sargent’s painting, we see it is not a portrait of a real person but a meditation on the nature of beauty. Sidlauskas writes, “when [Sargent] defended himself against his severest critics, he invoked the fidelity of his canvas to his sitter’s public persona.”

Gautreau, was an outsider to French society who infiltrated this exclusive world using her looks and a carefully curated public persona. In her time, she was considered the most beautiful and fashionable woman of Paris. She was famous and became a sort of symbol of beauty in French society.

More than challenging the Lady’s reputation, Sargent is using her image to challenge the culture’s popular understanding of beauty.

In portrait art beauty came to signify the goodness of the sitter. It was believed that beauty was an innate quality and the viewer believed that by evaluating the physical beauty of a subject they could know something about the person’s character.

In his painting Sargent portrays beauty not as an innate quality but as a kind of persona. For Sargent, beauty is an act. By presenting herself in an extreme contrapposto – a pose associated with Venus herself – Gautreau is playing the part of the beauty.

This wonderfully exaggerated twist that defines the subject’s pose shows her simultaneously twisting her body into view and diverting her gaze away from the viewer. With her head in profile the beautiful Gautreau is refusing to be known and Sargent refutes the notion that beauty is a window into the sitter’s soul – or the visual embodiment of goodness.

Sargent’s Idea of beauty

To fully understand Sargent’s idea of beauty, consider the next painting he did after the Madame X affaire. So violent was the reaction to his portrait of Gautreau that Sargent left France and sought refuge in England.

Living in the countryside with friends, Sargent took almost a year to produce his next work, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. Like so much of Sargent’s art it would be easy to write this painting off as sentimental arrangement of children and flowers. But like his portrait of Gautreau, Sargent is not focused on his subject but what gives it life.

The painting shows two little girls lighting lanterns at dusk. It was painstakingly done from life and took almost a year to complete. Painting plein air, Sargent worked 10 minutes at a time to capture that last fleeting moment of light before night sets in.

In the portrait of Gautreau, Sargent has captured his subject in motion. “Madame X’s body appears to press forward, a sensation reinforced by slight projection of her dress’ bustier and by the flexed tendons in her neck. These tensed cords make us intensely aware of the supreme physical and mental effort that she must exert to hold her head in profile, while keeping her body in adamantly, even aggressively, frontal position” (Painted Skin, Sidlauskas). In reality, the twist that defines her pose could only be held for a couple minutes.

Similarly in Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, the flowers, the youthful nature of the girls, the lantern’s candlelight and the diming twilight all represent a fleeting moment. It is a beautiful image but it is also profoundly melancholy because everything that makes this image beautiful cannot last.

In those early Florentine portraits, the artist aimed to present the fundamental characteristics of the sitter. Painted without space, light or movement, the sitter is presented as fixed. These “paintings embody the universal, the eternal, rather than the specific and the transitory aspect of things” (The Florentine Profile Portrait in Quattrocento, Lipman).  In this context beauty is also fixed.

In Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, the warm orange-pink glow of the candlelight that illuminates the girls’ lanterns is set against the cool purple atmosphere of crepuscule. The soul of this painting is this contrast of warm and cool light. Again the source of sublime in Sargent’s painting comes from labour not nature. The little girls are creating a sight of beauty by lighting their lanterns.

For Sargent beauty is not natural. Madame x is beautiful because of her pose. The little girls are beautiful because of the light effect they create with their lanterns. He is rejecting the classical definition of beauty as innate. Instead, he presents beauty as something artificial and therefore democratic.

Throughout the 19th century, countries like France, the United States and Russia underwent revolutions which aimed to create more equal societies. During that period the realist art movement developed with the aim of making art more representative and democratic.

In his art, Sargent shares the role of artistic creator with his subject – a truly democratic act. Realism made fine art more representative by expanding the scope of subjects “worthy” of depiction.  Sargent takes it a step further by transforming the role of the artist’s subject from passive object of admiration to creator. His work is a celebration of agency and the universal ability to create beauty.

 

Sources

Lipman, Jean. “The Florentine Profile Portrait in the Quattrocento.” The Art Bulletin 18, no. 1 (1936): 54-102. doi:10.2307/3045611.

Sidlauskas, Susan. “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X”.” American Art 15, no. 3 (2001): 9-33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3109402.

Khali Coulter, Debauched: Atypical Depictions of Female Agency and Gender Roles in Madame x. http://arthistory.us/display.php?eid=40

David Alan Brown, Virtue and Beauty. Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women. (2001) : pg. 11-24. National Gallery of Art Washington

 

Meme of Kehinde Wiley’s Obama Portrait

There is a meme going around twitter that likens the Barack Obama portrait , by the artist Kehinde Wiley, to a scene from the Simpson’s where Homer is backing into a shrub. It’s interesting in that it highlights an essential element of the portrait : the living plant life that makes up the background.

Wiley almost always places his sitters on a flat patterned background. In this portrait he has brought the background to life. When you think about what Obama has represented in American history this visual play is quite powerful.