Self-Portrait (Re)authored: an Investigation of the Self in Art Making
My project Self-Portrait (Re)authored is made up of eight acrylic paintings on paper board. The brightly colored paintings diversely render an original self-portrait for which I created a grid and offered up to my friends and colleagues so that they could (re)author my self-portrait in the classic paint-by-numbers style. Each painting varies, some slightly, others greatly from the rest despite the fact that they originate from the same pallet of colors and from the same design. One painter, quickly frustrated from the tediousness of having to neatly fill in the blanks, quickly smudged everything. Another, not wanting to take the time to wash the brush between colors blended the colors together. Each painting has an almost eerie likeness, but a distinct uniqueness from the rest.

The inspiration from this project came from a comment made to me by a critic about portrait paintings I had been doing. She said my work looked like the paint-by-numbers paintings you often find in retired old women’s homes that they have purchased at craft stores and completed in the comfort of their living rooms while chatting with friends or watching Days of our Lives. My reaction to having my work aligned to the kitschy, lowbrow art form was a mixture of feeling insulted and amused. If after years of technical, intellectual, and conceptual training, investigation and pursuit, the thought that my work had a strong likeness to the paintings done by people who merely want to pass the time and hang something “pretty” on their wall, meant that my studies had been in vain. So, I wanted to investigate my artistic practice in the realm of this medium of lowbrow work.

I chose to turn my own self-portrait into a paint-by-numbers painting because the self-portrait, for me, embodies everything that a paint-by-numbers kit does not. The self-portrait, historically, has been a means for the artist [painter] to have an emotional look into his* own soul. In the seventeenth century, the height of the noble portrait practice we commonly think of, the artist was seen as having “special insight into the… inner or ideal self” of the person he was painting. Not only was the artist revealing his technical abilities to render himself realistically, but also the artist professed that the process was one in which he could visually fabricate his intangible psychological character. The self-portrait, in particular interested me in this project because the psychological self-investigation of a self-portrait completely falls apart when you have someone else, someone who may or may not know you very well, recreate what was once a personal exploration.

This investigation made me aware of the fear that artists have in demystifying their artistic practice. So, I intentionally abdicated my power as an artist by revealing my process to the participants and viewers of this project. In essence, this body of work became an attempt to elucidate and expose the stigmatized painting process. This project demystifies the artistic method, and particularly the painting process in three ways: by removing the “artist’s hand”, including the authorship of untrained painters, and finally by introducing logic to the artistic process.

I removed the artist’s hand (mine in this case) from the process of art making by giving explicit written and visual instructions as to how to paint a portrait of myself. Although I had a role in forming the ideas that created the set of paintings, the actual act of putting paint on the paper, the aspect of the artistic process most revered, I left to the participants in my project. Jeremy Havens, a recent graduate, did a similar project to mine for his Bachelor of Fine Arts senior thesis show . His project, called Paint it Yourself, however, did not emphasize the importance of leaving out the well-trained artist. His art, already linear in nature, lent itself to being easily painted by filling in the spaces present in his practice. Havens simply had the participants add to what he already had created, rather than take away his power as an artist. My piece was created by first painting a self-portrait, then by constructing a linear drawing that could be used by my participants to render the original. In essence, I gave the process of painting to the participant and took from myself as the artist. Therefore, the act of producing my paint-by-numbers project is “entirely external” to my process, as Arthur Danto said of artist Yoko Ono’s instruction paintings. Ono’s instruction paintings consist of a series of written instructions as to how to do specific paintings. Her work, like my own, denounces the stigma of the artist’s hand by simply telling her audience, in written form, how to create the described paintings. By creating a work of art that removes the artist’s hand, the work negates the myth of the genius-artist and thus demystifies the process of painting for both the contributors as well as the viewers of my work.

The demystification process happens not only because of the absence of the artist’s hand, but also equally important is the inclusion of the hands of the participants in the project. In negating the importance of the artist’s hand, my work insists that the hand of the untrained artist become the substitute. This is not to say that, I, the artist, am absent in the artwork. Rather, I just remove myself from the stigmatized process of putting paint on the canvas. This act of stimulating and guiding the artistic process resonates with the way muralists map out and plan a mural in a neighborhood yet solicit the members of the community to both help with the planning process and actually apply paint to the walls. By including the community in the painting process, muralists are able to give their communities both a sense of ownership in the mural as well as a closer relationship to fine art. My work, although I have drafted the grids that I asked my contributors to fill in, leaves the actual process of painting up to the participants. Like the community muralist, I have created guidelines for my participants, but ultimately, the partakers have the agency to do what they please with the work. Some of the paintings completed for my project were smeared, the lines ignored, others did not follow the codes I provided. In all cases, the decision of how to follow my guidelines was left up to the participants, thus the partaker had to make artistic decisions, and so he or she became the artist. Thus, like the community muralist who may direct and advise the community, my artwork guides the participating artist, but ultimately, the one who puts the paint on the paper becomes the artist and thus the process of painting has been simplified and elucidated.
The quantification of painting, through the use of numbers, is the third aspect of the demystification present in my body of work. Using numbers as a means of communicating how to paint associates painting more with logic and less with emotion. The concept of the genius-artist having strokes of brilliance in his studio falls apart when painting can be broken down into the logic of placing color number “7” in all the spaces that are labeled “7”. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, a “two man collective” play with the notion of quantifying and, thus, demystifying painting in their exhibition “The People’s Choice”. In this project, Komar and Melamid used polling agencies, the Internet, and community meetings to collect information which they subsequently analyzed to produce the “least and most wanted” paintings among people in different countries of the world based on the polls. Komar and Melamid’s questioning included inquiring about the preferred colors, seasons, types of art, and historical figures of the people polled. Like Komar and Melamid’s work, my artwork also has taken the art making process and dissected it. The process of creating a painting becomes, for Komar and Melamid, no more difficult than asking a series of questions, and for my artwork, it consists simply of putting the correct color with the correct number. Therefore, my work takes a third approach to demystifying the genius-artist, by making it logical and not an emotional spillage of the inner psyche of the artist.

Self-Portrait (Re)authored, eight versions of a portrait of myself completed by others, elucidates the stigmatized painting process by eliminating the artist’s hand, involving the artistry of untrained painters, and reducing the artistic process down to a numerically logical process. Although the process of creating this body of work was not a psychological investigation of my own soul in the sense of the seventeenth century self-portrait, I still participated in a self-investigation as I inquired about my role as an artist in the process of reproducing my own image, which I found does not need to involve a tight grip on the notion of myself as the genius-artist.