Student 23

The me I have come to know When I take a look inside my soul I see many things. It is sometimes hard to look at the surface and be able to tell who you really are. The self is a very complicated thing to analyze; one could spend a lifetime trying to figure it out. Does anyone really ever know ones self. I think its possible but it takes a lot of searching.

In our assignment we had to take a look inside and create self-portrait of what we saw. As I thought about myself I wandered how I could portray my personality in the best possible way. So I choose to create painting using pastels. When I began this assignment I didn't think that I was going to be able to create a piece of art that factually represented me. I toyed with different ideas and came up with mixture of things.

When I look at myself I see many things. I think the number one thing in my soul is that I like to keep things simple. I believe that society today is too busy to slow down and just look at the world and Mother Nature all around us. I feel that I can relate my spiritualism to several origins. I like the views of many eastern religions. Taoism is what believe is the closest there is to finding the true self. I also think that Buddhism and Shinto have place in the self.

In my self portrait I tried to relate myself with the many things we studied this semester. The first is the use of color, line, and shape. This is the largest part of my portrait. The color scheme that I used was the Yoruba color aesthetics. The primary colors were the "Du du" colors. These colors are earth tones. The colors include browns, greens, and black. These colors show that I have down-to-earth, practical personality. I also used some "pupa" colors, which include red, yellow, and orange. These colors show that I am passionate and like to show emotion at times. The use of line in my portrait is also important. I used a lot of curvy and a few straight lines. Curvy lines show that I am sensuous, erotic, and artistic. The use of straight lines show that I am a dependable person and will always be there for my friends and family. The shapes I used were the pyramid and the circle. These express the unity and the balance that I strive for in life.

A description of my portrait is this: The wavy lines at the bottom surround a face. The line flow in and out of each other showing a form of symmetry, but at the same time they are chaotic and in no particular order. The same goes for the top. It is a depiction of space, which is beautiful to look at and has symmetry, but in the raw it chaotic and always changing. The mirror in the middle creates a metaphor between life and the universe. They are both mirror images of each other. My portrait is idealistic because it is depicting ideals rather than a concrete idea. I also have a musical selection that goes along with this. It has mixture of constance and dissonance. The name of it is Boree by Jethro Tull. Although not originally by him I believe it to be the same as my self-portrait.

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