Painting my self portrait - Part 4

Even though I'd already spent a lot of time working on my self portrait, at the beginning of the next art class (one of the last we would have to work on the project), there was still a huge part of my portrait missing - the black right side. What could I do with it? I had a basic idea: I wanted to write the names of all the countries I had lived in with oil pastels, and then paint over them with acrylic. Since the oil pastels repel water, the writing would be quite visible and the background would still be black.

This time I experimented with the new technique before using it on my actual painting. It seemed to work alright, so I wrote down lines of the countries I'd lived in going down. My basic idea was to have one line of text for each year I spent in the country, but actually I gave all the countries at least two lines because it was easier to read. So basically, the right side looks like this:

Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia
Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia
Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand
Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand Thailand
Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pa
Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pak
Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pakistan Pa
Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador Salvador
Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda Rwanda
Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru Peru

After writing everything in oil pastels, I started covering it with heavily diluted acrylic. This is where things started going wrong. First of all, I found that the kind of pastels I used to write "Pakistan" and "Peru" were soluble in water, so they started fading out and leaving orange and blue streaks on the page. Second, the water was so diluted that you could very easily see the brushstrokes and the color wasn't even at all. I added more and more coats and the same thing that happened with my face happened with the black part...there was too much water and the paper started coming off. I stopped adding layers but it still didn't look right.

I continued working on my project at home. Once my self portrait was a little more dry, I added layers again. This didn't really fix things. The more water I used, the more evident the brushstrokes were, and the least obvious the text was. Finally, I decided to go for a more subtle effect and covered the letters with thicker black paint. This made the text harder to read but it also evened out the color, so overall I think that was an improvement and partly fixed my mistake.

The problem was that without the writing, the right side looked a little boring. There was still one of my interests that I hadn't expressed, computers. I decided to have that in my self portrait by pasting binary code (the very basic code that makes up computer.). I printed a lot of binary code, tore off little pieces and glued them on my artwork. Since they stood out a lot, I painted them in black and arranged them so that it looked like they were flying away, out of grasp.

Finally, I added writing with the leftover binary code. It was inspired by one of my favorite books, the Gemma Doyle trilogy, where the heroine says this at some point:

"Do you ever feel that way?"
"Lonely?"
"Restless. As if you haven't really met yourself yet. As is you'd passed yourself once in the fog, and your heart leapt--'Ah! There I am! I've been missing that piece!' But it happens too fast, and then that part of you disappears into the fog again. And you spend the rest of your days looking for it." (Bray, The Sweet Far Thing)

I often really do feel like I don't know who I am and maybe I never will. Every time I think I have found out something about myself, something happens and I realize that's not exactly who I am yet. So on my artwork, I wrote:

Tell me who I am

Because there are times where I really wish someone would.




Bibliography

"Daler Rowney Oil pastels." No date. Online image. Jerry Artsrama. 29 Sep 2009 <"http://www.jerrysartarama.com/images/resized/386x450/PRODUCTS/PASTELS/Oil_PASTELS/DALER_ROWNEY/0077653000000-ST-03-Daler-Rowney-Oil-Pastels.jpg">

"Acrylic paint." No date. Online image. eHow. 29 Sep 2009 <"http://i.ehow.com/images/GlobalPhoto/Articles/2285887/paint-main_Full.jpg">

Bray, Libba. Gemma Doyle: The Sweet Far Thing. Reader's Circle: Jersey, 2008.