Karun Sudhakar’s self-portraits are a series of three pieces that together represent a moment in his life that affected his identity. Each piece shows a wallet displaying the content that would be found inside. The wallets are created with watercolor and the content is shown in graphite. Sudhakar’s cohesive series of self-portraits use color, medium, line, space, and specific content to tell a personal narrative.

In this series, each wallet in the piece is created with different colors. The first is used with olive green mixed with shades of orange and black outlining. The next piece uses a dark orange hue and the last is a light brown leather color. The olive green color with a mixture of orange represents an unsophisticated, young wallet since these are childish, bold colors compared to the adult light brown, leather looking wallet. The progression from the youthful wallet to the mature, light brown leather wallet shows the growth in his life from childhood to adulthood.

Not only does the color show this progression, but also the medium used describes his personal story. Watercolor is a very fluid, transparent medium that can be used to show looseness and carefreeness. This can be seen in the green and orange wallet in the first piece of the series. Watercolor can be saturated to become a more dense, mature and bold color shown in the light brown wallet. As the wallets become more adult in style and color, there is more content in each wallet. The use of graphite to draw cards, coins and money in the wallet increases in each piece in the series, which represents maturity and growth since it is a controlled and structured medium.

The lines used to create the wallet and the detailing shows personal growth. On the first wallet, the lines are loose and the black outline bleeds into the orange and olive green color to make a soft line. This symbolizes the freedom and carefree children have. The lines become more structured on the orange wallet and the brown leather wallet has meticulous detailing, representing responsibility in adulthood.

Sudhakar used the space on the paper to represent growth and maturity. The first wallet has a couple coins, the second uses more space with a couple cards, cash and coins, and the third has many cards and cash. Looking at the pieces together, it creates a rising bar between all three, demonstrating growth figuratively and literally with the amount of items in the wallets increasing with each maturing wallet.

The use of wallets as a self-portrait shows a different and more meaningful way to portray oneself. Although it does not show the viewer the actual image of the creator, it represents Sudhaker psychologically more than an image of his body would. Each wallet shows growth and also location. Each wallet has content specific to a country, like the MetroCard in the last wallet, representing where he is currently. This makes me infer that the wallets represent points in his past where he has lived.

The use of color, medium, line, space and specific content creates a cohesive set of self-portraits that creates a story about Sudhakar. At first, seeing three wallets does not seem like something that can represent some, but the artistic elements create a complex and interesting identity of the artist.