Assignment Five: Face as a marker of subjective experience

During my preliminary research for the assignment I was particularly struck by John Currin's 'Moved Over Lady' which speaks about the anonymity of middle age. I decided to use this as a starting point to express something about my own experience of being a middle-aged woman. I started with a straightforward line drawing of my face. I am looking directly into the mirror and what I see does not please me. I think you can see disappointment and defeat in my expression. I have kept the drawing straightforward with minimal shading to preserve the grey ordinariness and nondescriptness of the subject.

A2 Graphite

I remember my mother telling me when she was in her mid 40's that middle aged women become invisible. At the time I was in my mid 20's and I though she was being ridiculous. However, as I have reached my mid 40's and passed through the menopause my experience has been the same. Younger people really do sometimes look straight through you as if you are completely irrelevant once you stop conforming to the ideals of youth and beauty imposed by society. The simple collage below was my first attempt to express this. I am in the corner concealed under tracing paper- sidelined, invisible, irrelevant.

A2 Collage

I decided to experiment with this further - I thought I could make a drawing rather than a collage and alter the composition such that I was sidelining myself to a a large and featureless background. My first attempt at this wasn't particularly successful as I had overdone the subordination of my figure. I left this and came back to it later.

Compositional Sketch in A2 Sketchbook

The next couple of drawings explores the fact that people don't see me clearly. The first one goes back to the image of the selfie that I used for my collage in the 'using colour' exercise. I have my chin lifted up trying to disguise my weak double chin and wrinkles - trying to look young, strong and attractive. I have repeated the same contour drawing over and over again with on sheets of acetate and fixed them slightly offset from each other which blurs the outlines. I cannot be seen clearly.

Marker Pen on Layered Acetate A4

My next drawing was made using oil bar on tracing paper with a but of graphite embellishment. This explores the fact that the onset of middle age for me coincided with moving to another country and being unable to express myself clearly in my second language. This meant I was unable to compensate for my reduction in physical attractiveness by being ferociously intelligent! I drew a straightforward portrait here and then wiped away the mouth leaving just a smear to signify my lack of voice. The image is viewed from the reverse side of the tracing paper to make my portrait less clear.  I also considered doing a further drawing in which my mouth was filled with black solid material to signify the fact that when you are not fluent in a language words feel solid and unwieldy.

Oil Bar and XL Graphite Stick on Tracing Paper

The other way in which I could have developed this concept would be to draw a portrait of myself and then erase it in a performative drawing exercise. Since I will never be a Willem De Kooning or Robert Rauschenberg I decided to leave that idea be for now.

I decided to go back to the 'Moved over Lady' concept. Unlike Currin's tranquil woman I am not happy when I look in the mirror. I decided to take a 'selfie' of me flinching away from my own image and to use this as the basis of the self portrait. Th picture of me flinching to the side also emphasises the saggy middle-aged jowls. This had to be drawn from a photo as I have my eyes closed. The other aspect of this is that I am refusing to engage with the viewer. I have placed myself  in the corner at one side of a page that is in landscape orientation and filled the background with encroaching darkness. This adds to the feeling of isolation and disengagement as though I am about to disappear from the edge of the page. I have treated the portrait quite simply in charcoal with the background in black oilbar.

A2 Charcoal and Oilbar

So far so good but I didn't feel the image was particularly visually exciting. I also wanted to obscure my image somewhat in exploring the concept of not being seen clearly or being invisible. I wanted there to be a greater contrast between my greyed-out self and the encroaching blackness. I applied a layer of india ink to an A2 sheet of acetate and used a cleansing wipe to remove a segment where my portrait would show through. The detergent on the acetate spread out in wonderful flowering marks. This was about relinquishing control to a certain extent and seeing what marks were randomly produced by the behaviour of the ink on the acetate. 

Unfortunately, when I placed the acetate over the portrait, I couldn't see the wonderful marks because there was a black background disguising them. I decided to place a sheet of tracing paper between the original drawing an the acetate. This served the double purpose of further obscuring (greying out) my portrait as well as allowing the marks on the acetate to be seen. I really like the effect of the acetate. As well as providing a voluptuous, glossy, inky blackness, in certain lights, the glare from the reflections on the acetate completely obscure my portrait. The other part of this is that I have attached the tracing paper and acetate just loosely around the corners which means that you can only see my portrait when the drawing is placed in certain positions. If the page is lying flat on a horizontal surface I can be seen quite clearly whereas if the drawing is vertical, the tracing paper falls away from my face obscuring the image further until you press the sheets of paper together. I like this - it is another aspect of relinquishing control - ultimately we cannot control how others see us nor indeed whether they see us at all!

Final Assignment Piece : Charcoal, Oilbar, India Ink, Cartridge Paper, Tracing Paper and Acetate.

*UPDATE*
After sending this off to my tutor I did some rethinking. I realised I actually wasn't happy to call this drawing my final assignment. I had been trying too hard to express something and had been over-thinking. The result was a drawing which, while appropriate for what I wanted to express didn't actually say that much about my preferred way of working. I had used very little of what I'd learned over the course in this particular drawing and I felt it didn't have the impact I wanted for a final assignment. 
In contrast, the small drawings I had done under the title 'obfuscation' (next blog entry) were more pleasurable to draw and more interesting visually. So while the other work was i for assessment I worked up a larger piece related to those drawings - see next blog entry.