Towards the beginning of the semester, I had to partner up with a classmate and produce both a self-portrait, and a portrait of my partner. In order to produce this portrait, we got to spend time to get to know each-other. We travelled to Macy’s as a class, and strolled around the department store together for an hour. This was an enjoyable but challenging process, as both my partner and I are fairly shy, and perhaps not always the most communicative. As this was towards the beginning of the semester, my partner also did not feel very comfortable opening up to me (obviously understandable!). However this made it very challenging to produce the physical art-works. It required a lot of planning and thinking as to how I would make our portraits.
The day of the critique itself, I received a large amount of constructive criticism. The teacher stated that my portraits were weak, and I hadn’t put enough effort into producing them. I had felt that I put effort in. I spent hours thinking as to how I could produce this piece, and spent hours aiming to produce a drawing of Ivy as realistically as possible. The teacher further explained how these dark ‘splotches’ on my piece do not represent anything meaningful. I understood where the teacher was coming from. I was still hurt.
I expressed the struggle of this project in a piece of writing for this class, describing the challenge of getting to know my partner and how that progressed into the later production of the piece. Interestingly, this piece of writing came out very strong, and I did feel like I was able to express my frustrations and disappointments through this writing. The teacher for my seminar class explained how the dark ‘splotches’ on the works represents the lack of information on my partner. It made sense. It helped.
An excerpt from the writing:
“I did realize my partner had trouble, or perhaps did not have the desire (as she comes across as fairly shy) to be very open with me. She also mentioned to me that she is not as social as others, which I had realized while talking to her, and reading her ‘I remembers’. However, in my partner’s last ‘I remember’, she opens up a little, and decides to share something much more personal (and even perhaps embarrassing): “I remember acting out scenarios in my head in advance the actual situations in real life, so that I would know what to say and how to act and how to prevent embarrassing myself”.
There was therefore a clear connection between the work I produced in my seminar class and my studio class. Yet, there was almost this ‘lack of’ a connection between the two portraits I produced for studio in relation to my piece of writing for seminar. The grades were different, the emotions behind the writing vs. the portrait was different..they two almost felt like entirely separate pieces.
Final portrait of Ivy
- Final self-portrait
