Who Am I?!
Why do artists produce self-portraits? I think there are several reasons. Firstly, they try to look at their selves. How do they see themselves? Do they really know themselves? Secondly, they try to show others their emotions. For example, Van Gogh, he had a lot of depressed periods. In those periods his paintings were painted with more sadly colours and much more vague, than in more happier periods. And thirdly, they just want to make an inheritance for others to see, much later, how those artists looked like.
Every self-portrait is saying something different. In Van Gogh’s: Self-portrait as an artist, you can see Van Gogh is looking quite sad and sombrely. The colour on the background is also quite simple and sombrely. Van Gogh used a lot of brushstrokes in his paintings to show a deep contrast and make it look even worse sad. It’s done to show he thought there was no point of living no more for him. Later he committed suicide. If you would compare the dark blue self-portrait to the light blue self-portrait, both from 1889, you can see that the lighter one is less sad and it makes you think that one has been made in a less depressing period, still you can see a lot of big curves on the background, showing he still got a confused and twisted mind, full of problems. Van Gogh’s most distinctive qualities, in my opinion, the brushstrokes, which he always uses, and the “stripes”, in most paintings he paints in small stripes. Another quality you could say would be his use of colour mingle, mixing two different complementary colours.
Another painter producing a lot of self-portraits is Paul Gauguin. He used a lot of humour and symbolic meanings in his paintings. F.e. in “Self-Portrait”, from 1889, he used a lot of symbols from the story of Adam and Eve, to show that temptation is easy, but punishment is hard to bear. In “Self-portrait dedicated to carrier” Gauguin looks quite old, fatigue and has got dark lines around his eyes, showing a kind of burn-out. When you get rid of the green strokes in the painting he looks much younger and the painting now looks much better.
On the other hand, Judith Leyster, painting no symbols, but showing expressions ab
out herself. To me she’s looking quite untrained and simple, however still looking happy and artistic with a beautiful picture on the background. Under the painting there is her original plan for the painting, looking much less beautiful and you can see something odd to her cheek and chin.
Andy Warhol, a painter that came up much later, had also his own style. He’s very famous for his Marilyn Monroe paintings, but he also made some self-portraits. His self-portrait from 1986, showing four crazy-looking Warhols in weird colours made with a computer. He was showing four different sides of himself, however all four in the same style. The painting looks really simple, but I guess it has a meaning too. It’s just expressing different emotions and styles of people.
And so you see, every painter has its own style of painting and wants to tell different things, still, they are all made for a comparable reason.
