Paint thyself as thy neighbor

Up until recently, I had never seriously considered painting self-portraits or, more exactly, when I did, I misused them for making some sort of rushed caricature.

One exception (a double portrait with my late husband, painted several years ago from a photograph) put aside, the whole thing never took me more than an hour.

So when I entered painter Rosa Loy’s master class at Akademie Bad Reichenhall at the beginning of this year, I had only a very remote idea of what to expect from the course’s outline “examination of the self”…

Following two quick, warm up pastel “selfie” sketches, Rosa asked me to paint a larger, multi-figure painting. Now where should I take those figures from? Fortunately, the lunch break saved me from immediate action and I had time to take a stroll through Bad Reichenhall’s pedestrian zone, where locals and visitors alike were heavily engaged in celebrating carnival.

When spotting a charming young waitress with a deer antler in guise of a headdress through her coffee shop’s window, the illumination was there. I could perfectly well be more than one, provided I found a good disguise within the next ten minutes. This proved surprisingly easy and so I left the toy section of the local drugstore armed with a feather trimmed plastic crown, a pink wizard’s hat and two masks.

My painterly self thus glamorized from the neck upwards, I proceeded to ignore the reality of my paint smeared apron, my old jeans and, ultimate decline of the Occident, my equally paint stained Birkenstock sandals, their utter ugliness being the price to pay for being able to stand all day in front of the easel.

They did not, however, ease the psychological pain endured during this enterprise. (Just made the most interesting typo here: “psychological paint…”)

Past the first five minutes of girly excitement about the new toys, staring in the mirror for days on a row was not exactly a walk in the park. In research of pictorial truth, I investigated the dark shadows underneath my eyes, the tired and sad lines travelling from my nose towards my lips and with every hour spent upon the painting, disliked myself just a bit more, consequently facing that self hatred in the mirror almost to the point of crying.

Something had to give – if I wanted to finish the painting, I would have to start to like myself a bit more, or this would never work. That was probably the moment Rosa chose to have a look at the work in progress and she advised me to lighten up the eye area a bit.

When I did, things started to shift. With just a tad of sympathy for my reflections in the mirror, I began to treat them like interesting surfaces. Bidding farewell to my supposed (i.e. masochistic) “pictorial truth” in turn revealed a truth of a more transcendent nature. All of a sudden, I was finally able to see something in at least one of my “selves” that other people had seen in me before – my strength.

If you would like to see where all those investigations led my fellow alumni and me and if you happen to be in or near Bad Reichenhall next week, please have a look at our group exhibit: