Student 15

5 May 2000

O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; You perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going my going out and my lying down; You are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue You know it completely, O LORD. . . For You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are Your thoughts, O God! How vast the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I wake, I am still with You. Psalm 139:1-4, 13-18.

Upon considering all of the cultures and thoughts of other artists and thinkers this semester, I have learned much about how other people think. I have learned that the things I see are not always the things that other people see. And the way I think is not always the way other people think. Freud is one that saw differently than I did. He hypothesized that our psyche has three parts. The Id, the Ego, and the Super Ego; the Id is our desires, the Super Ego is our very moral conscience, and the Ego is the balancer of the two. I understand a little bit of where he was coming from, but I tend to like what Jung said better.

Jung thought that there were two types of people: the extroverts and the introverts. The extroverts are those who like to think out loud. They process information better by speaking it aloud. They also tend to enjoy their downtime with people. Introverts, on the other hand like to think in their heads, and once decisions are made, then they speak them aloud. They enjoy their downtime either alone or with other people. The Hindu religion is a totally different way of looking at the self. They basically believe that there truly is no "self." They believe that we do not fully understand that yet, but that someday we will all realize that we are one cosmic wholeBnot exclusive from another. This is very different than anything that I have ever thought, because I was raised in a Christian family. It is very interesting to learn about what other cultures and religions believe. It helps me to be able to better relate to those around me that may not think the way I do.

The Romantic Period is right up my alley; I totally see where they are coming from! They believed in self-expression to the fullest. They thought that their art should be all about emotion and the expression of that emotion. They captured emotion with beautiful poems, paintings, and songs that expressed the feelings that they had. They also had a very strong emphasis on Nature, which I also understand. I love the natural. If we all lived in tents and planted flowers all day, I would be happy.

In my self-portrait I used several of the new ways of looking at things and also some of my own ideas to convey to the class what I have learned about myself this semester. I have created a literal portrait of myself with several techniques. My picture is framed with a very simple, natural frame because, as I said before, I am a simple, natural person in appearance. On the glass of my picture I have painted the shapes and colors that I think define who I am inside. I used red, wavy lines to show my passion and femininity. I used green to show my love for nature and the triangles to represent that fact that I am a stable person, people can usually depend on me. My yellow squares, again, show that I am a "square." I tend to be very prudish and reliable despite my passions (yellow). My orange crosses show that I am encountering some cross roads, but not as many as some people my age. The blue circles are for my religious affiliations (which I will go into deeper later). I tend to come off cold-hearted because I am very independent and I don't like to be around many people, hence the blue. I used the Yoruba color system to define what the colors meant for me because I think that they are right, as I see it. I hide the photo behind the painted glass because, I am hard to get to know. I don't like to let people in because I think that they should really want to know me before I will invest a lot in a friendship; that's why people think I'm cold-hearted. I don't mean to be that way; I just don't want to be hurt. ( It is a survival tactic.)

The picture behind the glass has three things in it. A shadow of myself talking a picture of myself, a tree, and an old door. The shadow is a representation of the fact that no matter how hard I tried to capture my true self in this project, I still only reflect a shadow of who I think I am. The tree, again, symbolizes my simplicity and my love for the natural; I especially enjoy the outdoors. The old door represents parts of my past that I don't even know. I was adopted at birth, and though I love my adopted parents very much, I still wonder about my past and my first parents;I don't know my nationality, my parents' medical histories, or even the face of the woman that carried me for nine months. The door is the past that is unknown and that I can not open.

Mostly what I discovered about myself in this project is that I don't know myself at all. It is kind of humbling to know that I have lived with myself for twenty years and I don't even know myself! The one comfort that I find is that I know that God knows me inside and out. In my Christianity I know that God knows and understands everything possible. The last feature about my portrait that I would like to share is what I have written on the matte of the frame. I have written parts of Psalm 139 from the Bible in Spanish. The reason that I wrote it in Spanish is that I understand parts of myself like I can understand parts of the Spanish language, but only God knows all there is to know about myself and the Spanish language. (As is true with every person and every language.) In this project I enjoyed taking what I learned from this semester and applying it to myself and seeing what I came up with. It is truly a hard and fun thing to study people, but sometimes it is hardest to learn about ourselves!