I think I’m Seeing Double

“Who am I”  is a question we have all asked ourselves and one I’ve gotten close to answering through painting. The way we present ourselves, engage with others, and view ourselves becomes the very definition of who we are as people. Through my work I began exploring how costumes can portray a sense of illusion while also providing a closer look into a subject. Through face paint and styling, I began to think about how color can affect the perception of a person. This brought me into how we as an audience can engage with an audience through common constructs of color i.e. blue communicates sadness or calmness when red can communicate anger or love. It’s also interesting how nuance can be found within that theory of color dependent upon the subject themselves. This brought me to how a piece directly engages with an audience: how does eye contact establish connection with a viewer and how do we create that immediate still connection in just the brushstrokes of an eye. I essentially create myself in an image for someone else to digest, in which my eyes communicate that I’m admiring the viewer as well, which may ask them to not only take a look at me and my identities, but their own as well. This process has allowed a deeper connection with myself but also establishes a connection between myself and others. The whole process itself is one of reflection and appreciation for my features and the many personas I hold. Gesture, blending, color all played a role in creating different variations of myself making each piece feel unique but as if they all belonged to the same person. I had experimented with washes, the opaqueness of my paint, scale & size, proportion and distortion to create images of myself in new variations. Most images come across with no context leaving room for the viewer to once again interact with the image and place their own interpretations on the person they’re seeing. What is so special about that possibility is that due to each piece’s factors that differ from the others, interpretations of the same subject will be different for each piece.