Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Art and Writing

Facing up to self-portraits.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

How do you go through life disliking a functional and non-deformed object attached to the top of your body which everyone sees? It is very difficult.

When nearly all of the family was home recently, and people were seeing me with all of my siblings after all this time, they made comments on how I looked like them or like my grandma -- things like that. My first reaction was sadness to my siblings or relatives that were being compared to me.

"You look like your sister Janet!" they might say, to which I would respond by promptly turning to Janet and saying "I'm sorry."

That's sick.

But I don't like my face.

My face is more than a list of current blemishes, crooked eyebrows, pointy eyeteeth, weird cheeky-cheeks-upon-cheeks, double chins, half dimples -- it's more than that. The same for anyone out there doing the same thing to themselves (and I know you're out there!) -- the face is a kind of alive thing and I always find that, in person, people are nothing like a dead photo.

But...I hate trying to do self-portraits, because I sort of nearly hate my face.

I groan when I think of the stupid self-portraits all the instructors kept trying to make me do when I was in college. I managed to either paint myself partially hiding behind objects, or draw something entirely non-human and BS my way through it with enough art-speak to confuse even the most ludicrous performance artist.

When Sabine was visiting from Germany this past week, I let her go through my art and take a bunch. She pulled one from the pile that she liked and asked me what it was.

"It looks like shells," she said. "There are different -- what is that, faces? -- inside the shells."

"It is. Actually, it was a self-portrait."

She looked at me strangely.

"I hate doing self-portraits, so I made this. I was trying to say that we all live in some kind of shell, and so the larger shell has all those other people's faces in it. This shell over here, by itself, is me. That's my obscured face inside that shell. Not only am I in a shell like the rest, but I'm not even with the rest."

"Julie..."

"Bah. I don't like looking at myself and drawing myself. So I did these assignments with fairly wide and farcical interpretations. Ah, forget about it. That drawing is eleven years old. Take it."

But tonight, I was looking over my list of personal goals and the many "to-do" lists I have. Two seemed to say that they belonged with each other:

start doing self-portrait sketches -- private only! in sketchbooks! -- and stop being afraid of your face; try to understand it for what it is instead of hating it!
stop being so hard on yourself and allow yourself some grace once in a while

Self-portraits as a class assignment are still lousy. I'd still hate them. But for self-study and practice -- they can be the ultimate form of art-as-therapy.

I'm going to cheat a bit at first. I have photos of myself that I shot (badly) for my blog which I took down during a time when all of a sudden I didn't want just anyone to be able to look at me. I'm going to start sketching from them. I can't take the live-face-in-the-mirror just yet.

See this photo at the start of the blog post? It's been a little while since I've had a photo up, and a long time since I've even broken a grimace, the first time a little wee bit of a smile started to reach my eyes, in a photo.

It's a start.

And I am happy that I look like my dad and my sisters and brother and mom and grandparents... beauty is the history, not some symmetrical alignment that wears makeup and the camera flash well.

I will, of course, forget this tomorrow. Hence, I need to do a quick sketch tonight, before I go to bed.