Self-Portrait Process

ARTIST'S USE OF SELF-PORTRAIT:



Self-Portrait 17
Gottfried Helnwein
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

This first image is a painting done by Gottfried Helnwein, a pretty famous contemporary artist working mainly in the realm of hyperrealism. I would've chosen one of his realistic self-portraits, but quite honestly you can't tell it's a painting so it's a poor choice for anything related to Illustrator. Anyways, Helnwein's work often explores dark and disturbing aspects of humanity, as well as the absurdity of famous cartoons and how that relates to what we experience (he often incorporates Disney characters into his paintings.) If this weren't titled as a self-portrait, there'd be no way to tell who (or what) he was painting. The two darker areas in the image hint towards eyes and there's a vague head-shaped structure to support that idea. Perhaps he's trying to comment on how humans try to self-identify with anything that's vaguely relatable and that the concept of "self" and individuality is something vague and perhaps absent. Or else I could be completely wrong. Moving on...

PICTORIAL ART MOVEMENT:

Suprematism: Painterly Realism of a Football Player (Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension)
Kazimir Malevich
Oil on Canvas

So the movement I looked at and am going to be incorporating into my self-portrait is "Suprematism." It came out of Russia in the early 20th century and was mainly the work of Kazimir Malevich. It laid down the foundations for following abstractions and my favorite art movement, minimalism. The picture is 'supposed' to represent a football player, though how and why is left entirely up to the viewer. In fact, I read that he would often hang his pictures in different orientations, so while it may look like the green circle is supposed to be the bottom of the picture here, if you were to see it in a gallery it could be hung with that at the top and still be 'right.'

GRAPHIC MEDIUM:

Here's a self-portrait by the grafitti artist Neckface. Grafitti is pretty cool but sometimes it gets a bit tried and true, which is why I enjoy Neckface's work so much. He usually uses solid black contours with maybe a color or two to pop something out of its environment. His style is, I guess, "creepy" and very un-grafitti-like, which is great. I think he recently designed a shoe for Nike, too. Anyways, because his style is so illustrative, it would be easy to do something similar in Illustrator, possibly even emulating the spraypaint feel by using a brush. My favorite thing about grafitti is the fact that, it, like graphic design, is something that's somewhat ever-present (well, maybe not here in St. Cloud, but...) I also enjoy how it takes something that wasn't meant to be "painterly" or "artsy" and uses it in a fashion that is, similar to how modernist architects used industrial materials to make homes, etc.