Self Portrait

Artist Statement

Throughout the semester I thought of all the ways I could make a self portrait. I contemplated over ways I could represent myself and what's important to me. As I usually do, I turned to music for inspiration. I was listening to a playlist with some of my favorite artists, and the song "Find Your Wings" by Tyler the Creator began to play. While listening it suddenly hit me, I could represent myself by mirroring the artwork of Tyler's Album, Cherry Bomb. Tyler the Creator is an artist who's music I enjoy, and is someone who is not afraid to be his true authentic self, a quality I always admired. Throughout the album he speaks about issues we can all relate to like love, depressions, self identity, and struggling to achieve success. In the cover artwork, the artist mixes real photography of Tyler combined with the illustrative imaginary identity he assumes for this album. But who is that new identity? To me that character he created is a reflection of his true feeling and inner self. I chose to do the same with my self portrait, using the Cherry Bomb character as a template to represent my inner self. This piece is a digital art piece, made in Adobe Photoshop, combining real and illustrative imagery.

I began with a photograph of myself, then I created the character that would overlay my physical appearance. Instead of pink, like Tyler uses on the album cover, I chose to use blue. I chose to use a darker and more melancholy shade of blue, which represent my pessimistic and cynical outlook on life. I am someone that suffers from depression and anxiety, so I tend to generally have a negative perspective. I don't let those conditions control my life, which is why I still chose to give my character big bright eyes and a slight smile. Underneath the blue skin, I used the texture of crumpled paper. This was a representation of the struggles I faced in my life. People usually crumple up and throw away balls of paper, but I refuse to give up on myself. Instead of throwing out the paper, I choose to keep writing on it.

If you look on the wall behind my self portrait I have a number of pictures and posters. The first is a framed image of Tyler the Creator's Cherry Bomb artwork. I wanted to add this to the portrait to provide context to those who have never seen the cover. I also have a dream of working on album covers in the future, so I chose to frame my dream, and continue to work to reach it. This way they are able to see the starting point and origin of my concept. The poster directly underneath that is an iconic poster of Angela Davis. She is an African American civil rights and political activist, philosopher, author, and university professor. I chose to add her to the work because she has been a role model in my life since I was very young. My family often spoke about African American issues in our country, and she was one of the first activist I learned about as a child. Her poster reads, "Power and Equality", which is something I believe everyone is entitled to. Just as we learned in this class, everyone has a right to be themselves and that is something I'm willing to fight for. To me she is someone that represents the African American struggle and how we have to help each other fight together. Not to mention she is a strong black woman that has fought to achieve everything she has, and she remains still a humble and passionate leader in the black community. As the son of a strong black woman, she is defiantly someone I will always look up too. My identity as a black man in America is very important to me, and it's something I will always be proud of.

On the other side I placed to framed space images. I placed these pictures in the work because they represent the intense passion I have for space. Ever since I was a child I loved space, I would watch marathons of space documentaries and television shows on the science channel. One of my first dreams was to be an Astronaut, unfortunately you need to be great at math, and that is not my song suit. So I turned to art and design, which is a field that works with science to make ideas and visions into reality. The scientist and astronomers provide the data, the designers will create what they need.

The main reason I can relate to the message of Cherry Bomb and chose to create my self portrait like this is because I wanted to show that we need to be our unique authentic self. We live in a time when it is very easy to lose yourself, and not know who you really are. It is so easy to follow a trend or have others change your opinions. We all need to look inward and learn to love ourselves, no matter what you look like. Physical appearances shouldn't be what stops people from coming together. The world is going through a crisis, and even once it ends, there are more issues we need to deal with. We can only solve these issues by learning to love ourselves, each other, and coming together.