My Pocket Sketch Book 3: A self portrait
I’ve drawn a lot of self portraits it feels conceited. But least I can get a good look at who I think I am. It always began as drawing characters for me to roleplay as a child. I’d draw them with my cousin, she’d describe her ideal fairy tale for me to illustrate and I’d explore who we could be. As an adolescent I lacked confidence and identity, I loved films and TV because of how definitive and recognisable the characters identities were. I experimented to develop my own style. But I also felt ugly, most likely as a result of the ethnocentricity of a rural white town. I aged and grew confident of my actions and choices, I understood that the true value of these characters I looked up to was the complexity of their lives. I began to understand that I can be diverse, complex and likeable just like fantastical stories.
If you grew watching SpongeBob as I did then you’d know Squidward predominantly paints self portraits; and they always have a form of distortion or misery. I found this intriguing as a child. The only person I knew or understood was myself and in fact I didn’t even understand how I saw myself at all. I often drew myself as a fantasy in childhood and in adulthood I try to maintain reality as much a possible. Not because I don’t dream of fantasies anymore, but because I understand the value that reality has producing the meaningful parts of the alternate worlds I enjoy.
Sometimes the things I draw begin with an exercise or experiment. I want to learn to draw an animal, so I learn the shapes. I return to pages another time to draw the rest of the image but I don’t see the same thing I started with anymore and I fall into a fantasy of that it could be. Mixed media starts to influence the endings of my drawings making them wildly different from how they began and some stay more or less the same.
Not every drawing looks like me but is a portrait of how I feel. Sometimes stylish, sometimes drowning. It’s never a concern when I look back. But often I realise how graphic it feels to capture a feeling in a sketch.
