This essay is about self portraits.
Why do artists make self portraits? There were a lot of painters in history who
made beautiful portraits. Painters such as: Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin,
Judith Leyster and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Before they started painting self
portraits, they first asked their selves a very basic but difficult question:
Who am I? Not everybody can answer that easily. Because you are a person on the
outside but it’s about the person who is deep inside you. If somebody answers
this question to quickly they normally do not tell the total truth. They then
only look at how other people see them and not at how they see themselves. Some
people have the idea that as they look into the mirror they directly know who
is standing there and who that person is, but that is not true. When you look
into the mirror you know how you look on the outside but not how you are on the
inside. What you do and how you behave in different kind of situations.
There are different reasons why people
make self portraits. One of them is that the person that you paint is always
there and so you can always continue at your own speed. Another reason is that
it is a really good way to practice painting expressions, and customers can
compare the work of the artist with the actual person, and when you die you
leave an image behind. So it is also a way of becoming immortal.
Sometimes painters of self portraits
make themselves look better than they actually are. They give themselves
serious expressions, or they let themselves look older, younger or more
handsome. Painters also use different colours to give patterns on their
paintings, and for example when they use darker colours they directly look more
angry. They also use different kinds of brushworks. This is clearly shown on
some nice paintings of Vincent van Gogh. He uses sometimes dots, little
stripes, big brush strokes or even huge spots and that on all different kind of
paintings.
Another well know thing in paintings
and self portraits are symbols. Painters use religious but also daily symbols.
Mostly even experts do not exactly know where those symbols stand for in the
painting. A very nice example of this is a self portrait of Paul Gauguin. He
painted himself on a orange background with a lot of different symbols. F.E.
the apple from Adam and Eve, and the snake which represents the devil or
knowledge. The orange background also has a meaning of fire.
Not only colours, symbols and
brushworks, But also the use of shadows plays a big role in the paintings of
artists. If they would not use shadows a face of a portrait would look flat.
But they also use it to hide their selves behind the dark shades. When you then
take away the shades you see a really nice picture.
Painters who made self portraits did
not earn too much money. So when a costumer asks for a different kind of
painting they changed it. This is what Judith Leyster did. She made a nice self
portrait, but changed it in somebody painting a musician. This clearly shows
how artists change their work to the wishes of their clients.
Nowadays most portraits are not made
by hand anymore but on the computer. Although they use a totally different way
of expressing their selves. Their art works still look great.
Maaike Stevens
T3A
