Identity and Time

Working from a photograph of myself as a four year old girl, I painted a portrait of a person who no longer exists. Though I recognize the picture as being one of myself as a child, and though I can still identify and understand that person, it is not a self-portrait. If anything it is representation of a time that is gone and, in spite of having the same face, of a dead person.
Like a post mortem daguerreotype, the painting’s creation took place as an attempt to hold on to someone who is no longer with me. It is an exercise in arresting the past, holding it still and, in doing so, freezing the deterioration that has already transpired. Using photography as a reference was extremely important in this respect. A photograph is a representation of a lost moment, a time that has ended, the death of an experience.
In the portrait, the upper half of the face is missing, overtaken by the black environment in which it is suspended. There are no eyes. There is nothing for the viewer to look in to, only to look at. In this context, it is a painting of an object; a still-life rather than life-drawing. I did this with the intention of underlining the poetics surrounding vision; that the eyes are the window to the soul. Here, the absence of the eyes is used to represent the absence of the soul. The spirit that inhabited me as a child no longer exists. It grew and changed into a different thing. My innocence is gone. I don’t look at the world the way I did when I was a little girl. The world and its objects are not as big as they had once seemed.
Representing the passage of time, that the image is dated and of a different era, was a very important detail that needed to be incorporated. This element was necessary in order to suggest absence and loss. Using an oval canvas not only suggests the tradition of portraiture, but of an aspect of portraiture that is no longer utilized. The oval was a favored shape in the Victorian era. Though the original image from which the picture was painted, a photograph taken in the 1980’s, was well after that time, the beliefs of that period are very much present in the lives of children. In American society, we are fond of viewing childhood as a time marked by innocence, purity, naivety, and asexuality. I wanted to use these connotations to reinforce a state of separateness between the depiction, its time of creation, and the viewer. The black background helps to tame the nostalgic air of the piece and to emphasize one of loneliness, detachment, and isolation.

This painting attempts to investigate identity and the assumptions that surround it, namely the contest between nature and nurture. Though I continue to share certain personality traits and characteristics with the girl I once was, I am no longer that person. I have retained a level of kindness and empathy for others, but that level is nowhere near as high as it once was. Circumstance has beaten a lot out of me, for the worse and for better. No longer hiding behind smiles and shyness, I have learned to protect myself and to not offer the trust that at one time was so natural to do.

While working on this piece, I thought a lot about Peggy Phelan’s article, “The Ontology of Performance”, feminist art and practice, and the state of the Other within art and society.
Children and women are often relinquished to the status of “other”, gaining little respect for their ideas, emotions, and intelligence. They are objects routinely used to represent ideas surrounding the family, domesticity, and ethics. As symbols, children and women have the ability to draw sympathy from spectators; but this sympathy is derived from the notion that both are defenseless and simple, a parallel that is not only incorrect, but highly offensive. It throws the shadow of victimhood over the faces of women and children, obscuring personality and individuality.
This shadow is incorporated in to the painting, not as a statement of truth but, as an understanding of social perception and as a representation of the loss of identity within our culture.

During the making of this painting, the loss of my childhood became overwhelmingly apparent. Shortly after that photo was taken, our family splintered. Though it may not be present in the work, thinking about my family history became a large part of the process. The themes of regret, secrecy, and “what might have been” are part of loss and are embedded in the experience of mourning. This painting was made as a way to mourn and to give voice to the longing that still nags at me and which cannot be satisfied: a longing to overcome the past.