Self-Portrait

Charles Butler


Professor O’Leary


Rutgers University | Newark


24 April 2020


Self-Portrait


Portraiture is an art practice that focuses on an individual, or group of individuals, as a primary subject matter within a canvas. This exploration can be journeyed through oneself or from another person modeling for a work. During this visual voyage, what is our intent when constructing a successful portrait? In reference to my own practice, the intentions behind my self-portraiture reflect my painterly approach towards imagery, self-discovery of the human figure, and experimentation with new content. Investigating a new approach towards optically understanding the formulation of constructing human figures exposes myself to new visual assessments to portraiture. I, as an artist and designer, am expanding my trade by pursuing this direction of self-imagery when composing the artwork, as I primarily work with abstractions.


Throughout the design process, I had sourced previous artwork as a base for my image to overlap in order to establish a semantic and syntactic relationship with one another. The canvas chosen was from my many visual exploration of painting in response to emotional provocations. My painterly practice works abstractly with acrylic paints onto traditional pre-bought canvases or foam-boards. The choice in the pre-bought canvas was an emotive connection towards my personal relationship with the artworks. It is an exploration of warm and cool colors kinetically manifesting and moving within the space as lines and shapes spiriting my emotions. These elements would progress and evolve into a visual language manifested by emotional responses. This exploration of painting has been influenced by the works of abstract painters such as Michel Basqiuat for his abstract figurative works of black men advocating social justice, Francisco Oller’s reference to cultural objects that derive from Puerto Rico, and Willem de Kooning’s conceptual approach in connecting painterly brushstrokes and color with emotions pivoted early practices of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Exposure towards Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, explains that his escapism was the library because he was able to draw literary inspirations at his own leisure. Under my circumstances, my art studio was an escapism from my personal problems and served as a coping mechanism because it provided me the safe-space to produce art. Within the studio, my emotions are applied from the mixing of paints on my pallet and then the paint is transferred onto the canvas, featuring automatic strokes and conjuring of abstracted shapes.


In conjunction with my image, I decided to freely paint my self-portrait over the abstract composition of my initial painting. Using my own image to overlap the painting was intended to create a formal and conceptual connection between the abstracted painting and my own imagery. Referencing myself as the primary subject of the composition demonstrates a correspondence of spiritual parallels among my self-portrait and the background imagery. The painted figure of myself exposes my identity as an artist when rendered in correlation with the abstractions, visually inferring that the rendered figure and the abstractions coexist because they are one in the same identity.