Series Of Self-portraits Research Articles

Beheadings and Self-Portraits in Caravaggio’s Work

The present study aims to investigate the psychological mechanisms beneath the change in the facial expression of some of the beheaded characters in Caravaggio’s works, starting from The Head of Medusa, from the artist’s youth, and reaching David with the Head of Goliath, a mature workpiece, searching the continuity between them through a series of self-portraits/ self-insertions of the artist in his work. The psychodynamic analysis is limited by the constitution of its practice to the study of the process of image production and the artistic imaginary, rather than to the investigation of man or the artist out of reach by means of figurative and symbolic language. This approach aims to highlight the drives of the unconscious, the structures of censorship and the technique of operating of the defensive mechanisms that ultimately could contribute to the production of such masterful images that are both seductive and confusing. The study incorporates and continues the contribution of authors such as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit who applied Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction theory in the analysis of Caravaggio’s works, but also the mirror stage of Lacan and the masterful study of Winnicott regarding the reflection of the baby in the mimics of his mother, an unconscious unclear image that will stand forever for the perception of the self. The change of the affective resonance, expressiveness and emotional relating to violence is natural in the course of human evolution. While not even the artist Caravaggio can elude it, his work can illustrate by deflection these transforma­tions of the dynamics of the mind, it can raise new questions and open new perspectives of understanding the artistic drive.

Alexei Colîbneac’s series of self-portraits

Alexei Colîbneac is one of the notorious graphic designers of the national art. Many distinctions and the presence of works in important public collections are proof of the artist’s mastery and of the intellectual message of his artistic discourse. In his imposing creation, we notice numerous series of drawings; one of them being the series of self-portraits, which was not exploited in theoretical studies. Researching the history of value appreciation of the artist’s creation, we found an impressive number of periodicals and publications, but too few scientific. In the series of self-portraits, on which the artist worked at different stages of his life, we see the author in a wide variety of states of mind and spirit. Based on these works, we trace the formation of the artist’s personality: from adolescence, youth, to maturity, in which A. Colîbneac fully demonstrates the ability to ask complex questions of an existential nature or to show slight self-irony, drawing some compositions as if joking. The drawings are made in various techniques of graphics, also the artist uses different languages for dealing with form and space, in some works strictly linear, in others using chiaroscuro. When the observer and the subject are the same person, the spectator witnesses an intimate monologue that constitutes an act of self-knowledge through plastic language.

Self-portrait as Epistemic Disobedience: Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama

This article looks at South African photographer and visual activist Zanele Muholi’s ongoing project Somnyama Ngonyama and argues that it continues Muholi’s lifework of decolonizing the canon of representations of Black bodies, especially Black female bodies. In this series of self-portraits, Muholi challenges conventional representations of Black bodies as they appear in Western art history, in ethnographic photography or in the conventional mass media. Repurposing familiar objects, the pictures also encode sophisticated puzzles that express a sense of stifling under the pressure of racist misrepresentations. However, they also counter this epistemic violence by performing ambiguous gestures of appearing or disappearing, challenging the racist norms that would confine black bodies in certain spaces while barring them from others.

Hybrid styles, interstitial spaces, and the digital advocacy of the Salafi feminist

ABSTRACT This article examines the online advocacy work of Zainab bint Younus, a Canadian Muslim blogger who identifies herself online as the Salafi Feminist. In 2015, bint Younus curated a series of self-portraits from women who wear the niqab, the Islamic face veil. These photos show the women engaging with Western consumerism and popular culture, but they also employ the blended visual styles and the hybridity of digital spaces to deconstruct dominant binaries of Muslim women. While niqabis discuss being treated as sub-human in public spaces because of their covered faces, the digital media provide a creative space to speak back and demonstrate their agency. However, these digital projects go beyond simply creating a space of expression, as these Muslim women engage with tactics of hybridity, mimicry, and disidentification to work within Western cultural spaces, such as selfies, social media posts, and consumer sites, to destabilize Western feminist notions of the liberal, agentive subject. These photos subvert the assumption that self-portraits must show the face, as the women cover their faces with the niqab but illustrate their personalities through other means.

Black geographies of struggle and pleasure in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes

In Nona Faustine’s photo series of self-portraits, White Shoes, the artist’s body becomes the agent in exposing the instability of racialized historical geography. Faustine revisits New York City’s landmarks to address what is missing or made invisible: a slave ship, a fugitive woman’s rebirth, or African burial grounds. Making herself visible where she is supposed to remain invisible, she highlights the unacknowledged connection between national wealth, nationalism, geography, and black labor. She discloses the topography of her travels as a changeable terrain, where one slips from the national iconic to ambiguous and finally, to the sacred. I suggest that Faustine doesn’t seek to democratize the extant historical maps, but to shift the terms of reading the city’s geography. She lifts the boundaries between the polarized pathways of knowing – the secularized and the sacred, the living and the dead, the verifiable and the missing. This shift is also made possible by the medium of photography and a feminist turn towards pleasures in one’s body. As Faustine comes to terms with the psychic and cultural inheritance of the diaspora, she moves from the collective body of pain towards black women’s pleasure in their own bodies without purging the history of sexual trauma.

Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: Graphic Memoir and Digital Afterlives

This article draws on comics studies, autobiography theory, and feminist theory to explore two autographics by the late Quebecoise cartoonist Genevieve Castree (1981–2016) and their mobilization online by a bereaved comics community. The article begins with Castree’s Susceptible (2012), a graphic memoir of coming-of-age in a dysfunctional family in 1980s Quebec. By focusing on lettering, layouts, and the braided motif of the bed, I show that Castree draws her maternal home as a conflicted space of both anxiety and security. This analysis extends to Castree’s 2015 series of self-portraits, ‘Blankets Are Always Sleeping,’ in order to reflect on the complex figure of the Sad Girl as a sign of gendered resistance. After her untimely death, images of the sleeping cartoonist were mobilized on social media by bereaved fans. I argue that this digital circulation inevitably simplified and sentimentalized her autographic persona, as the remediation of her self-portraits online transferred their signification from individual expression to communal grief. The article concludes with two graphic elegies posted online by Diane Obomsawin and Vanessa Davis in the week after Castree’s death to consider her posthumous place amongst North American female cartoonists.

A work of art: Expression of disease symptoms

A work of art is most often a result of an artist's inspiration, a reflection of feelings, but often a deep insight into his own personality or events and activities around. The analysis of a work of art may reveal not only a state of mind at the moment of creation, but also a deeper background, which may be a consequence of a disease. A classic example is Van Gogh's self-portrait without the ear occurring after self-injury as a result of his mental illness. In a series of paintings and prints entitled 'The Scream' Edvard Munch clearly evokes a state of panic that used to grip him occasionally, which he even verbally depicted. A great painting poet of the first half of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall, in several of his paintings, composed during the artist's hard period, varies the theme of a double-face with one usually dark side, and the other - light, indicating a bipolar disorder. However, a picture may not only be a reflection of the spirit of the artist, but it can also indicate an organic disease. It is known that Claude Monet complained of losing sight; in fact he suffered from cataracts. He perpetuated the development of this disease by a large number of paintings and drawings of water lilies in his Japanese garden, made over the period of more than 20 years. The last of these pictures, when he could see almost nothing, seem a bit abstract, full of bright colors, so he probably wanted to offset the greyness which he was surrounded by. William Utermohlen, an American painter, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, showed the development of the diseases in a series of self-portraits. Frida Kahlo, a brave Mexican painter, had a serious car accident when she was eighteen, which left her paralyzed for life. Severe injuries she sustained in the accident are anatomically correctly immortalized in several of her paintings. Spiritual and physical conditions of an artist as a consequence of a disease can be found in other art forms too. In his novel The Idiot, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky made a very striking description of an epileptic aura (a disease from which the author himself suffered). Franz Kafka in his novel The Trial gave a perfect description of the feeling of paranoia, and his story The Metamorphosis presented a hallucinatory state of the same basic disease.

Self-Portrait with Ghost: The Art of Lament and Redemption

A series of self-portraits, portraits of family, landscapes, interior scenes of the houses in which Emma Hoffman lived, reflect her lamentations, her wandering, her search for redemption. She had many losses during her life and art was her salvation. This essay is the result of an ongoing dialogue between Hoffman's paintings and her granddaughter Naomi Lowinsky's poetry. Jung's work, The Red Book, provides an archetypal framework for the journey to hell and back.

Uncanny Motions: Facing Death, Morphing Life

When visiting an exhibition of the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck's (1862-1946) paintings and drawings in May 2012,1 suddenly felt that I was faced with a ghost. Strolling in the Villa Gyllenberg Art Museum in Helsinki and pondering on the exhibition title Helene Schjerfbeck: Spirituality in Art, my viewing experience was interrupted or, rather, radically transformed.1 Gazing at the series of self-portraits that Schjerfbeck is most famous for as an artist, made during the final years of her life, I encountered a frame that, in lieu of a painting, featured a video loop: an animated rendition of Schjerfbeck's self-portraits that merged thirteen works into an apparendy seamless unfolding of the artist's different ages, her face transforming from that of an eighteen-year-old to that of an eighty-three-yearold (figures 1 and 2). Whereas the artist's paintings and drawings hanging on the walls of this art gallery, engaged in the commemoration of her work and the times that had passed, the video-tided Metamorphosis and running as a fifty-second loop-seemed to bring the dead artist alive, over and over again.2Watching the silent video, we first see a serious young girl's profile with a glassy eye, pouty lips, and soft hair. With the computer graphics technique of morphing, the girl's face transforms into another face-or, rather, the same face but in a later phase of life-with a smooth, apparendy seamless transition. As the video progresses, the young woman appears in color-a black crayon drawing has transformed into an oil painting-as a face with blue eyes, red lips, and rosy cheeks. As the young woman is transformed into an older version of herself, the pose, style, coloring, and distance from the viewer change. As a viewer, one is focused on alternating details: wide eyes with heavy eyelids, half-open lips, and different hairstyles. As the video unfolds, the face begins to resemble a skull: the features become blurred and simplified, the jawline becomes more prominent, and the hollow eyes and the mouth stand out in the pale face. This sense of abstraction, reduction, and distortion continuously intensifies; the face becomes increasingly distorted. Eventually one sees a skull, a green-gray figure barely visible against gray background, with eyes and half-open mouth as black holes. The film ends with a charcoal drawing reminding us of what once was a human face.3 Concluding with a black frame and a quote by the artist, Oh, I wish I had a full life ahead-to paint, as well as her signature, the video frames itself both as a further artwork by Schjerfbeck, a compendium of the whole of her oeuvre, and as a living portrait. Regularly the video starts anew, running as a loop.The video exhibited at Villa Gyllenberg was apdy tided Metamorfoosi {Metamorphosis), evoking the classic work by Ovid, Metamorphoses, and its key trope of shape shifting: transformations from human through inanimate object to animal and back to human. The video was produced for and by the neighboring Didrichsen Art Museum, where it has been displayed in 2006, 2009, and again 2013 but with a different tide, Morfologia (Morphology), intended to emphasize the technology used in the video.4 Metamorfoosi/Morfologia is a reedited version of a video originally produced in 2000 by the Finnish Science Centre Heureka with the tide Helene-Taiteilijan elamankaari {Helene-Life of an Artist). At Heureka, the video served as one of the technological attractions (the process of morphing was an innovative technology at that time) in a larger exhibidon on the stages of human life, Minaja sina-Seikkailu itsessamme {Me and You-An Adventure in Ourselves). Encountering Helene-Life of an Artist, museum visitors were faced with a choice between two buttons: either view the video from birth to death as a movie or to run the video backward, viewing the life course retrospectively from death to birth, pausing for every artwork and reflecting on the age of the artist.5 While Me and You-An Adventure in Ourselves ended in 2001, the video was subsequendy incorporated into Heureka's permanent display (figure 3). …

Self Portraits (As a Jew)

How does one pass as Jewish? What are the signs? How many layers of costume and persona does it take to be perceived as Jewish? The bearded Jew, devil horns, Jewish noses, and other such accouterments and myths are the materiality of this series of self portraits.

From Zandvoort to Tangier: The Artistic and Religious Identities of Jozef Israëls

In 1908, Jozef Israels (1824-1911), the well known Dutch artist and prominent member of the Hague School, painted a series of self-portraits. Blurry but recognizable to anyone familiar with Israels’ work, his earlier Biblical painting David and Saul served as the backdrop for the artist’s depictions of himself (Figure 1). In the piece, the elderly painter stands respectfully in the gap between the lounging figure of King Saul on the left and a youthful David playing the harp on the right. Israels’ gentlemanly demeanor is reinforced by respectable attire - a black suit, spectacles, and a gold watch chain. In terms of color and composition, his figure at eighty-four blends in harmoniously with the Biblical scene behind him. The muted colors of both the ancient scene and of Israels’ contemporary figure create a bridge between past and present. Centered between one ancient King and the young man soon to replace him, Israels appeared to self-consciously link himself with this celebrated Biblical past. Upon closer examination, however, Israels advocated association rather than continuity between himself and the two powerful Israelite kings. Decidedly modern in appearance, this European of the early twentieth century had little in common with the ancient figures behind him. Israels understood himself to be not, as his acquaintance Frank Gunsaulus wrote, a relic of the ancient past but rather a Dutch Jew. 1

Portraits à la lettre : la correspondance d'Emerson et de Carlyle

This study offers to read the correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle as a series of self-portraits where Emerson appears alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, under the guise of the friend, the literary agent, the vanishing self, and the author. Using the concept of “iconography,” it argues that Emerson reinvests the traditional characteristics of epistolary writing (such as fragmentation, incompletion, and dynamics), in order to compose a self-portrait in motion and to create a paradoxical, as well as ever incomplete, image of himself in which each trait belies another.

A Series of Self Portraits

A Series of Self Portraits

Anton Raederscheidt’s Distorted Self-Portraits and Their Significance for Understanding Balance in Art

Following a right cerebral stroke, the German artist Anton Raederscheidt produced a remarkable series of self-portraits that depicted his severe visual neglect and gradual recovery. These distorted images, like those drawn by others with this disorder, inform us about lateral balance in art and why it is common in the art of cultures separated in time and space. After describing how artists in various cultures have employed lateral balance, I present Arnheim’s view that this aspect of art is the result of visual forces generated by the brain. Following a brief history of visual neglect, I present evidence that this disorder provides us with clues to the origin of the visual forces responsible for lateral balance in art. The relevant brain mechanisms control exploration of visual space by integrating orienting movements with visual spatial information. The prevalence of lateral balance in art becomes understandable when we consider that these brain mechanisms evolved to promote survival in our vertebrate ancestors. I end with a speculative neurological account of the aesthetics of lateral balance – why it is pleasing and its absence is displeasing.

Great Artists: From Giotto to Turner

Great Artists: From Giotto to Turner

Finding a voice—artistic expression and practice development

AbstractThe present paper describes the development of art activities in a practice development unit in Nottingham, UK. The authors offer theoretical underpinning of their work by discussing the relationship between mental distress and creative expression. It is acknowledged that although there is much interest in the arts in mental health care, research into the subject is in its infancy. It is asserted that by objectifying distress, that is, getting it ‘out there’ instead of holding everying inside, the individual may find release, catharsis and—most importantly—feel listened to. Art enables people to find a voice. The authors argue that people who receive mental health services need more holistic and creative therapies. Whereas holism may be taught in nurse education, the regard for the spiritual or poetic is easily neglected in practice. Two examples are given from practice, first, some illustrations represent some of the work achieved by a group of female mental health service users. Although never intended to be a therapy group per se the work was indeed therapeutic. Six women met for a number of weeks in order to express their feelings about the impact of mental illness upon their lives. The results of their work were later displayed in the Trust's own art gallery in Nottingham city centre. The exhibition was a great achievement for the women. The second example given is an exhibition of the work of Arthur Ride, who has been a mental health service user for his adult life. Arthur's work is a series of self‐portraits documenting his ups and downs and periods in acute psychiatric care. A broad understanding of human experience is called for, a view that may encompass the beauty and pain of mental distress. Copyright © 2002 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Baudelaire's "Argot Plastique": Poetic Caricature and Modernism

Recognised as the author of the first philosophy of caricature, Charles Baudelaire formulated in his 1855 essay De l'Essence du rire an understanding of distortion and comic intent that would come to shape, Ainslie Armstrong McLee argues, not only poetics but also the modernism his works helped unleash. Exploring the poet's early fascination with the affective power of caricature, with its unique mingling of visual distortion and verbal commentary, Baudelaire's Plastique charts the movement in poetry toward a language equally open to distortion, equally visual, equally able to elicit response. Distortion had become, by day, widely accepted as a satiric technique in the graphic art of Goya and Daumier, both of whom the poet admired. McLees aims to demonstrate that caricature, graphically and culturally a vehicle of sharp wit and a social commentary, became in works a means of exploring the human condition and art itself. Using its capacity for deflating commentary to subvert the conventions of his age, transferring its range of subjects into a poetry that celebrated the underclass, Baudelaire focused the lens of on the relation of subject, artist and viewer. In a series of self-portraits, both graphic and poetic, he expressed concerns that would be taken up by modern writers, from Edvard Munch to T.S.Eliot. Argot Plastique reveals the importance of as a model for poetry. Tracing the convergence of poetics and the rise of in the nineteenth century, Ainslie Armstrong McLees charts the creation of a new genre - poetic caricature - through which Baudelaire not only freed himself from literary conventions but anticipated the themes and techniques of modernism.