an unabashed look: self-portraiture

I assume that art is the manifesto of the human condition, and I assume that self-portraiture is the daring side of it.
A self-portrat is an observation, a study, a fantasy, a prophecy, a narration of a metaphysical journey..
A self-portrait is a complaint, a scream, a desire, a plea..

Here is one of my favourite self-portraits, a painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner...
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was an outstanding expressionist painter from Germany. He commited suicide in 1938, at the age of 58.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Self-portrait as a
Sick Person, 1918

Alice Neel

Alice Neel was an American painter, born on January 28, 1900.
She mainly painted portraits (of artists, poets, political personalities, lovers, neighbours and strangers), but she also painted landscapes and still lifes.
She had a highly distinctive style, and her paintings are notable for their emotional intensity, her style reminds me a bit of Egon Schiele's.
She became a painter with strong social conscience, and equally strong left-wing beliefs.
Neel's fame was at its height at the time of her death in 1984.



Alice Neel - Loneliness 1970

 

Alice Neel - Andy Warhol 1970

Alice Neel - Robert Smithson 1962

Alice Neel - Hartley 1965

Alice Neel - Nancy Selvage 1967

Alice Neel - Anthony Barton 1968

Alice Neel - Ginny in Striped Shirt 1969

from 'Down and Out in Paris and London' by George Orwell :

'And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs -- and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off alot of anxiety.'

an extract from chapter III

November graveyard: by Sylvia Plath

The scene stands stubborn : skinflint trees

Hoard last year's leaves, won't mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn

To elegiac dryads, and dour grass

Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness
However the grandiloquent mind may scorn
Such poverty. No dead men's cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones
Paving this grave ground. Here's honest rot
To unpick the heart, pare bone
Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton
Bulks real, all saints' tongues fall quiet :
Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare

Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind :

Whatever lost ghosts flare,

Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor

Rave on the leash of the starving mind

Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

From: The collected poems by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

In a world that embraces all kinds of bigotry and contradiction so tight, i am obliged to submit to an unauthentic ideology, the "only me" axiom, I correspondingly betray my voluntary, quixotic dogma, and follow a capitalistic, morally low tactic, one that is exclusively devoted to my own benefit.

Artists may be born not made, yet some have to proclaim themselves as artists to get away with their unsettled minds. Artists are always excused or overlooked for being madmen/women.

Ironic poem about prostitution: by George Orwell

When I was young and had no sense
In far-off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,
Her teeth were ivory;
I said, “for twenty silver pieces,
Maiden, sleep with me”.

She looked at me, so pure, so sad,
The loveliest thing alive,

And in her lisping, virgin voice,

Stood out for twenty-five.

1925 - Published under Orwell's birthname of "Eric Blair".

George Orwell

A tribute to Paul Gauguin

My long hair... it's not a bland sort of beautification, it's a dramatic tribute to Gauguin's primitivism...



Paul Gauguin - Day of the Gods (1894)