My mission is to challenge expectations of the self-portrait, especially the self-portrait of a woman or a person-of-color. I show a woman-of-color articulating her own story and the story of painting. As a female artist-of-color, I have internalized the expectation that I should mine my personal experiences as case studies in the social conditions of race, class and gender. I both accept and step beyond that expectation. I aim to hold and to embody in my work both politics of identity as well as the function of self-portraiture exemplified by Poussin’s 1650 self-portrait: displaying authority within the history and discipline of painting.
To destabilize the genre’s old and current conventions, I merge past and present ideas of self-portraiture. In addition to Poussin, the predecessors informing my approach are Velasquez, Kerry James Marshall and Doris Lessing. For readers of Lessing’s 1962 novel about living in the world as a woman and an artist, The Golden Notebook, Lessing, through her main character’s color-coded notebooks each with a specific writing style and purpose, shows the complex interrelation of artist’s experiences, feelings, intellect, and craft, thereby enacting the relationship between art and its genesis. Using paintings within paintings, I enact the same. My sources are my own art which echoes both the figurative painting tradition and my lived experience–my mixed Black and Indian heritage, the birth of my son, the death of my mother. Using broad, historical, visual languages, I create intertexts in which all of the works are my own, expanding the woman-of-color’s self-portrait beyond its social context and into a complex narrative of being and making.
To destabilize the genre’s old and current conventions, I merge past and present ideas of self-portraiture. In addition to Poussin, the predecessors informing my approach are Velasquez, Kerry James Marshall and Doris Lessing. For readers of Lessing’s 1962 novel about living in the world as a woman and an artist, The Golden Notebook, Lessing, through her main character’s color-coded notebooks each with a specific writing style and purpose, shows the complex interrelation of artist’s experiences, feelings, intellect, and craft, thereby enacting the relationship between art and its genesis. Using paintings within paintings, I enact the same. My sources are my own art which echoes both the figurative painting tradition and my lived experience–my mixed Black and Indian heritage, the birth of my son, the death of my mother. Using broad, historical, visual languages, I create intertexts in which all of the works are my own, expanding the woman-of-color’s self-portrait beyond its social context and into a complex narrative of being and making.