Ahhh the self-portrait!!!

Sometimes I find self-portraits more interesting than a regular old painting because we get to see the genius behind the work. It's curious to see how the artist represents himself or herself. Are they shown with their 'tools'? Do they express an emotion? Or do they remain as enigmatic as before? I am bringing up self-portraits because I had to do my own for Drawing Studio. We used medium toned paper and black & white nu-pastels.


What does my own self-portrait say about me? Maybe I'm curious, contemplating the meaning of life and my purpose on this earth, or I'm just smiling ever so slightly because doing it more would hurt my face after a while. That's what it shows! A lazy couch slug!


Art history provides us with many wonderful self-portraits, a few of which I treasure! My first favorite self-portrait is of Durer, a Northern Renaissance artist (which means he wasn't in Italy but he was well known there!). After traveling to Italy, he picked up the tradition of the 'artist genius'. In Northern Renaissance, artists believed their talent came straight from God, while in Italy, they believed the talent was credited more to the artist and saw them as intellectuals. Durer liked the 'artist genius' and brought these views back with him. In his self-portrait, from 1500, he shows himself in a frontal pose, which had always been reserved for Christ. This way he is the artist genius and source of his own talent.


My second favorite self-portrait is of Rembrandt, a Dutch Baroque artist. He painted lots and lots of self-portraits, about 80 or so survive today. This provides us with good documentation of his life. In his earlier work, he is lively and young, but after his wife died, his portraits became more somber. His work is well known for having a psychological element.



My final favorite self-portrait (for now) is of Angelica Kauffman, an English neoclassical artist. Throughout the Renaissance and Baroque, there were not that many female artists. They painted still lifes and portraits and couldn't paint the nude figure. This makes Kauffman even more important to art history! She was seen as a prodigy at an early age and travel around Europe meeting the prominate art figures of the time. She was one of the founding members of the Royal Academy of Art in Britian, which opened 1668. Unlike most female artists, she didn't paint easy portraits but instead painted history paintings. In this self-portrait she is shown with two pupils. She always paints herself with her tools to show that she is a painter because many male artists said that a man painted the paintings for her. In this particular painting, there are no men, except for the marble bust of her father in the background. I love how she paints fabric so naturalistically.

Lion Demon

Hurray! We finished our second project in Space Research! For this project, I decided to make a Mesopotamian lion-demon mask. Lion-demons are a hybrid creature, having a lion head, donkey ears, and bird feet. It has the torso of a man. I just bought an illustrated dictionary of Ancient Mesopotamian gods, symbols, demons. The second I saw this demon, I knew I was going to make in cardboard somehow. To have that human lion hybrid, I made the lion head into a mask so that my body could be incorporated into the piece. It's a pretty big piece but it's not that heavy.


The mask has a wonderful regal profile and is best viewed from this angle. Here it is displayed on my lovely stand for our critic in class today.



Here is the mask being worn. Like I said before, it's not that heavy because it is made out of cardboard. It does get warm after a while. I feel pretty cool with it on.


In Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods, lion-demons are protective creatures against other demons. They are relief sculptures in kings' palaces and clay figurines. In old Babylon, the lion-demon was a bringer of disease and death.

And on another note, Happy St. Patrick's day.

Value Drawings

We just finished our value drawings in Drawing Studio.  We did one in class and one at home.  I had never done a 'true' value drawing before; consequently, the process was very foreign to me (but I enjoyed it and would do another in my free time!).  First we did a line drawing of the objects or still life.  Then we toned the entire paper.  Basically, we took our graphite stick or our charcoal stick and put an even layer of graphite/charcoal on the entire page.  We made it fairly dark, too!  Then we started with the eraser and added values with it by erasing some of the tone and added darker values with more graphite/charcoal.  I used graphite on both of mine. 

This is my in-class value drawing.

This is my at home drawing.

So our value drawings are done and we started portraits followed shortly by figure drawings.  I'm really excited; I didn't expect myself to be.  We got to draw a model in class, my first model!!!  We didn't have that much time in class to draw because we critiqued our value drawings.  I wanted to make my drawing look like a Renaissance drawing, like one of Leonardo's, so I used cross-hatching rather than blending of graphite.

Can you guess which one is mine and which one is Leo's?

What I did with my Snow Day

I did nothing with my snow day. I went for a walk and took pictures of the snowy city landscape (see blog post 'Winter Walk'). I worked on my cardboard Mesopotamian lion demon mask and am almost done with it. I ate a slice of cheesecake while watching Pan's Labyrinth, which made me sick. Then near the end of the movie, my laptop froze and I had a five minute freak session as I tried turning off my laptop and getting the DVD out. I fixed it and finished the movie. I colored in some coloring books and watched TV. So, I didn't do very much today.


Here is the Little Mermaid page that I colored today with my markers (I sound like such a kid).

I actually started this drawing yesterday when it first began snowing. She's some sort of snow faery. Back in high school, I painted a series of watercolor paintings of Snow Queens spurred on by The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie. Here again I used my markers but with colored pencil added in. I found these really awesome photos of a Snow Queen ballet through Google on the Internet machine. The costumes are sweet and the theatrics are haunting in that fantastically cool Ice Queen way! I wish I could see it live (or at least on television)!!!


If I could go back and live my snow day over, I would try to get a lot more done. Maybe like a nap or two. Oh well, Friday is suppose to be a high of 68.

Winter Walk

It is the second day of March and it snowed in Richmond!  This morning I woke up to find a wonderland of ice and frosting outside my window.  My dorm building sits right on the corner of Monroe Park and the view is gorgeous!  The trees and benches are laced with white!  And to top it all off, my classes are canceled for the day!!!  I haven't had a 'real' snow day in a long time.  So before the sun came out to melt all of the snow, I went for a Winter Walk in the park and down Franklin St.