Q. How long did your portrait take to make? Is there anything about the process you’d like to share?
A. For three months, I worked a few hours a week to complete this self-portrait.
I started by lightly sketching with graphite to find the structure and contour and intermittently smudged and erased working with the delicate gray shiny medium of the graphite to find the image. I continued to work inside and outside the contour lines of the face as I looked at myself in the mirror. In the final stage, charcoal was lightly applied on top of the graphite in selective areas of the face and background to unify the self-portrait.
Q. Is there anything about the sitter you’d like to share?
A. I was the sitter for this self-portrait. By portraying myself in the act of drawing, a journey began in search for the complex relationships between details and broader shapes. Self Portrait -The Journey emulates the formalistic style influenced from past traditions pictured in postcards of paintings and drawings of artists I love so much on the wall behind me in my studio: Paula Rego, Vincent Van Gogh, Alice Neel, Richard Diebenkorn, and Egon Schiele. I imagined entering into a dialogue with them across time and space.
Q.What is your background with portraiture?
A. Psychological awareness and the human condition have always been the catalyst for the portraits I paint. I have focused on the faces and figures of the people I know best: family, friends, neighbours, and my own image. At the core of every face I paint and draw is to capture the essence of the person’s life in raw form.
