As one of my assignments I have to do a self portrait…

Again I had one of those half awake ideas just before falling asleep and being inspired by underwater photography and having bright poppy red hair thought it would be cool to try and take some photo’s of myself  (my head only, don’t want to freak people out!) in the bath with all my hair floating about… You know it’s one of those half awake ideas because I hadn’t thought it through properly – Do you know how hard it is to lye in water and take a picture of yourself? Praying to the universe that I don’t drop the camera!… Then after I had spent half an hour balancing and trying not to drop the camera did it dawn on me that the self portrait has to be painted form observation… and there I was trying to do something a little different… Yeah…

Well as I still had to complete the assignment asking me to do a surrealist painting based on a dream, I thought maybe it could work for that. I must admit I had been putting this assignment off, thinking about what I could do. I wasn’t comfortable painting something I dream. For one I dream very like a Mighty Boosh episode (far to much partying in my youth me thinks) and two it’s personal – too personal.

Maybe I think it’s personal because I used to have a huge interest in dream interpretation and read loads on the subject. I hear people telling me about what they’ve dreamt the night before and I’m like; Really? Hmm, thats interesting…

So what to do? Normally I would paint something personal to me  and leave it to the observer to interpret the painting. But this is for an assignment, I have to explain… I have to put my explanation out on this learning log/blog thing for the world to see… Er no thank you! It’s weird enough doing this as it is…

My thinking was I do dream of water a lot  and when I used to meditate I’d always be over water or under water, so I thought maybe this image might be perfect… It’s a starting point.

I then remembered a poem from “A Body Made of You” written by my beautiful friend Melissa Lee-Houghton called “Miranda”. If you haven’t read Lee- Houghton’s work before, you should – it’s fantastic and you can order a copy of her book “A Body Made of You” from all the usual places like Amazon, Waterstones etc, but the best place is straight from the publisher Penned in the Margins.

I love working from Lee-Houghton’s work, I find it so inspiring.

I started out by taking the photo into photoshop and manipulating it – just messing around really. Although I did like the way the light reflected onto the bottom of the bath and created kind of rays of light around my hair.

This is how it turned out…

I then decided to paint a sketch of it, leaving out the shadow down the left side of my face as I didn’t think this would translate well when painted …

I like the way the sketch turned out, I like the looseness and the abstraction, so I’m going to use that instead of painting it again. Sometimes it just happens like that. I now just need to decide what else to put in the painting as the assignment states that I have to have images that are of a Juxtaposition to each other… More thinking…

You know it’s so weird painting yourself

Thank you for reading and hope you have a brilliant afternoon

Alex

xx