self_portrait twiggie i'm finally finished, after staying up until 5am and only getting 4 hours of sleep. I worked on it more today, the frame was put on and it's DONE. now i get to go to sleep in my bed (thanks to megan, otherwise i'd be sleeping on the couch again). 010318 ... birdmad in pencil and ink on linen paper one a flattering image the other a grotesque caricature neither one accurate the ironic narcissim of self-loathing 010318 ... johnny west I drew a sketch of myself naked once. Just something I scribbled out quickly. I didn't look at it for a while. One day, fucked out of my mind from no sleep, I looked at it again and couldn't stop laughing. It didn't look anything like me but, in a way, it managed to convey some of the things about me that scare other people. A girl I didn't know snuck a peek at the naked self-portrait, and I laughed even harder. Sometimes I think I wouldn't mind feeling like that all the time - so tired that nothing means anything and everything is painfully funny. I almost feel like I'm outside of myself...ooooooh.....sexless euphoria. 010318 ... stupidpunkgirl if you want to see mine go here: www.geocities.com/invalid_twist102/vision.html 010319 ... johnny west |~~~~~~~~~| ~~(- [ -)~~ ~~_______~~ ~~= = = =~~ ~~|||||||~~ ~~|||||||~~ 010401 ... johnny west That's pretty freaky-looking. 010401 ... thorn i came home exhausted and sad, and i am making a self portrait. to help me see myself, and so maybe other people will actually see me through it. 051215 ... ovenbird In tenth grade I painted myself on canvas. Life sized. Daunting. Me on the brink of sixteen wearing flared black pants, my favourite shoes with the decorative zipper across the toes, a faux leather jacket, the teddy bear my father gave me on the day I was born dangling from the hand closest to the viewer. I thought that childhood was so far away then, even though my hair was still damp from my arrival on this earth. I wasn’t keen on growing up. Even when I was small I dreaded my birthdays. I always liked the age I was at just fine and had no desire to move onto the next one with its growing and changing and host of unknowns. I wanted to stay the same. I wanted something inside me to feel stable and familiar. I hated painting that self portrait. It was too big and overwhelming, like being alive. Now when I paint I start with a tiny canvas. Nothing larger than twelve inches across. I paint leaves and flowers and animals. I paint in watercolour, giving in to its unpredictable fluidity. I like getting into the details, getting lost in the hours. This is a self portrait too—one that describes the trajectory of my attention. That life sized canvas was thrown away when the school had nowhere to store it. I didn’t want it back. I didn’t want to stare at a badly rendered image of my own awkward body. You can see me better in the birds I paint in granulating mineral colours, each feather considered, the eyes as alive as I can make them. A representation of my face can tell you what I look like, but it does little to tell you who I am. 260706 what's it to you? who go blather from