June 2022: The Selfie

Every June I paint a self-portrait for my birthday. It's a way to spend time with myself, notice how I'm changing, and knit that together with how I'm evolving as an artist, making it into a physical thing that, too, will begin to age. Now I have a little collection.

Here's an early one. I made this with India ink and a paintbrush in a cheap drawing sketchbook in 2016.

Drawing myself is big part of my practice, and goes well beyond the birthday thing. When I was first learning to make portraits, I imagined someone else's face as The Human Face, the one I needed to learn to draw if I wanted to draw "a person." There's an awful lot to unpack there, but it's not hard to imagine where I got this idea: it doesn't matter if we look to healthcare legislation & pay disparities or youtube drawing tutorials & the icons of art history, the idea of A Person is not me.