Assignment 1: Introduce Yourself - Research and Preparation

 

For this assignment we are asked to create a self portrait as a way of introducing ourselves to our tutor. We can choose our format and medium/s. It can be figurative but may not be. It introduces the way we work as artists as well as other aspects of our lives. 

I decided to make my self portrait as a small book. This is partly because I like making books, and partly because I have an existing body of collages on this theme, created and reinterpreted over a number of years, and I want to work with them in a new way. Creating a series of self portraits over time has been an interesting process of reflecting on both my inner life and my more public life. The opportunity to make and bind them into a book marks a new point in my self understanding as well as being an introduction to others. 

As part of this project we’re asked to look at artist self portraits as a starting point. It’s so interesting to see these self portraits alongside the artists’ style of work, from Frida Kahlo and Piet Mondrian to comic makers and mixed media artists of less renown, represented in their pictures of themselves. It made me wonder whether everything we create is, in some way, a self portrait? 

 

I then went on to consider the kind of book I would make. The collages fall into two distinct groups, although there is interaction between groups. I therefore decided to make a book with two sections, with ambiguity as to whether one set comes before or after the other set. Each set forms both the beginning and the end as they face in different directions. This seems to describe me in a way that a single self portrait could not.

I looked at fonts I wanted to use, based on Art Nouveau, but decided in the end that the mood of these fonts didn’t really fit the reflective and handmade aspects I associate with self portrait. I made tables in Pages to get the words centred and spaced correctly and added two concentric circles to the front and back cover using Photoshop. I then printed them and used coloured pencils to colour the sections, indicating by filled sections and outlined sections which end of the book is which. I inked the edges of all of these with brown ink to give a more handmade, less pristine look to the pages. I’m not a formal person and the pages looked too smart to apply to me!

I’m now straying from planning to making, so I will stop here and add a new post with the making and completion of the book.