My research project this semester for Studio and Seminar was influenced by the question, “Why Does Everybody Want Me to Draw Them?” and it evolved into an exploration of identity, along with the ways portraiture exists to depict various characteristics and nuances of a person’s identity. For my studio project, I wanted to explore how various tools, such as mark-making, color, patterns, etc., can symbolically or abstractly express different things about a person in portrait.
I initially planned to create a series of abstract/symbolic portraits about a friend of mine whom I know extremely well, but when I was conceptualizing them, I realized that the elements of her personality and identity that I was choosing to spotlight, along with the specific ways I was planning to express them in the drawings, were basically all things that she and I have in common, and that I was essentially just creating a list of conceptualized self-portraits. So, for this project, I created a self portrait.
This drawing was the one I chose to properly finish to present in the final critique because it is composed of many of the elements I had chosen to explore over the course of this project, specifically the absence of both the face and literal depiction of a specific person’s likeness. This related this drawing most closely to my thesis, which argued the unnecessity of a literal depiction of likeness to the characterization of a portrait. I didn’t use a reference for this drawing, apart from my own hair, to intentionally support and relate to my thesis. Additionally, this allowed me to further explore my increased curiosity revolving around whether or not it’s necessary for a portrait that is created to represent a specific person’s identity, which also features a literal depiction of likeness, to depict the face/likeness of the person whose identity is being represented in order for that portrait to be successful, or whether it can be equally if not more effective to utilize someone else’s face/likeness in that portrait to communicate something, since I’ve argued that a literal depiction of likeness is neither necessary to nor the primary function of portraiture, but that it is a communication tool that can be utilized to more effectively communicate a person’s identity, which is the ultimate purpose of portraiture.
Here are some process photos, in chronological order of creation, which range from literal to abstract to concept sketches for what finally became the drawing pictured above:
Had I taken this project further in this class, I would have redrawn the final drawing to integrate the rainbow of color into the hair and adjust the composition on the page to make it larger to fill more of the page with the figure. I would then have wanted to focus on significantly increasing the size of it, as well as experiment with different materials to serve as a “canvas” that could also serve as a symbolic element, which is something I do plan on continuing to explore and experiment with in the future.
But in the meantime, I’m now currently in the process of drawing Carolina from class, because despite arriving at an answer to my research question, everybody still does, in fact, want me to draw them.
