Dr. Herman Asarnow

English 107G Fall 2001

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Painters' Self-Portraits

As you visit the following pages and view the self-portraits painted by these vivid personalities, resist assuming that each is simply a record of the artist's self at that time, merely a record of a single, simple, aging self. Rather, consider that each portrait can be viewed as an act of self-creation. A self-portrait is an autobiographical statement that asserts this is me! But at the same time it is also a work of art and not simply life itself.

A self-portrait is a created object. To create it, the artist makes a series of choices (color, layout, kind of paint, brushstroke, detail, expression, etc.). And the choices could have been made differently. Indeed, all representations of self, in paint or in words, entail such choices. Implicitly, then, each portrait also can be seen as a projection of a chosen self the painter may have been trying on and chose to portray. So approach each painted self-portrait

• As a projection of a self the painter may have wished would be seen by others
• As the image of one of many selves the painter experienced as part of his or her personality
• As the image of the painter's self at a particular moment, as the result of a particular experience or feeling, etc.
• And perhaps an image of what the painter wanted to be.

Similarly, written autobiography, and the autobiographical presence in nearly all expository and argumentative writing, can be seen as willful acts of self-creation aimed at serving the purposes of its creator.

A painter uses paint, a certain surface, and the many complicated ingredients of paintings (perspective, figure, brushstroke, texture, etc.) to portray a self-image through a self-portrait--or to convey a certain character (the artist's self) underlying the image of any subject he or she paints. Thus we can be drawn to a certain painting because it is a Picasso or a Dürer or a Kahlo.

So entertain the idea that the public self--in writing, painting, or simply our actions in the world--arises from many possibilities. It is, or can be, a matter of choice as well as chance, a matter of free will as well as fate, a matter of one's own nurturing and creating as well as of the nurturing of others or of the biological inheritance passed on to us through our genes.