Self Portrait

"Q"
Quran Sherrod

The title of my self-portrait is “Q”. My piece is a digital art piece combining imagery, type, and line to create an abstracted Q. I chose the letter Q because it's the first letter of my name. The imagery in the piece is a picture of myself that I treated in a way to showcase motion, chaos, and an all overness. I wanted to depict the portion of my life that makes up a big portion of who I am and how I function in my normal day today. When it comes to family, friends, work, and school, there is always something going on. From the smallest dilemmas to the major life-altering obstacles, I'm no stranger to change or things not always being steady. Some people may look at it as too much going on or as extra to deal with, but I find that it keeps me motivated and pushes me to keep all of my building blocks from falling. The year 2019 has been by far my most challenging year. From a close loss in the family to relationship problems and even not having a stable mentality, there was a lot of moving parts in my life that I had to sort out and fix on a larger scale. I wanted to show this kind of dilemma through my imagery to give a visual representation of what it looks like behind the scene. When pairing these photos with type and line, I wanted to depict what it looks like looking in from the outside of my life. In my family, I am, in a way, looked at as the golden child. I'm the one who chose to follow a path to higher education at which there hasn't been one to do so in years. The lines serve as a sense of direction and structure for the elements within the piece. With these combined elements, the viewer can see a Q from afar, but when you get closer, it gets more intricate and crazy.I would relate my self-portrait to a quote that stood out to me from this class. This quote comes from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and it states, “If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But failed to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.” I strongly relate to this statement. Coming from a low-income city, filled with violence and everything bad, I have an understanding of how to survive for lack of better words. I found a way to maneuver through the many bad influences and role models while still learning from how they moved and went about things. I was always the kid to be into the books and do my summer school assignments and that gave me some ground to fall on. That opened doors by placing positive educated people in my life to push me to where I want to go, and where I dream to be. All in all, with a crazy background and the world running rapidly, I still find a way to create some type of order in life. I try to look at the brighter sides of situations and take everything that I can from every situation whether good or bad.