Day 95.

An intellectual experience. Another essaylette.

In tenth grade, I took Art History. The final project of the class had a reputation: twelve 4x4'' paintings, self portraits in the styles of twelve different artists. I had never painted seriously before, and I struggled. It would take me hours to get the style of the artist right, and then I would realize it looked nothing like me. For the last month of class, those self portraits followed me everywhere. I remember taking out my paints waiting in the doctor's office, trying to fix my Emily Carr portrait (I got an a first-name basis with these portraits, so she was Emily.)
When I finished Emily I started on Egon (Schiele)-- the tortured, repressed teenager shielding himself with his sharp angles, sallow skin. I never really got the parchment color of that skin right. The pain, almost paranoia, in his eyes was harder still to get on the small square of posterboard.
Roy (Lichtenstein) was nicer to me than Egon. I painted a cartoon girl, a bubble of thought proclaiming her blankness in a world gone nuclear.
And Francis (Bacon) went quietly--inside the black box, my face was swollen like his. Blurred almost, a face like discolored pewter, with a smear of white and pink, an abstracted pig nose, black slits for eyes.
Vincent, Salvador, Paul, Gustav, Amadeo-- my parents looked at me sprawled on the floor painting at 4 am, newspapers on the carpet, and told me the Modigliani looked fine.
"No no," I said, "the eyes are all wrong! They have to be distant, unknowable. And the nose isn't graceful yet."
They stared at me like I was crazy.
Painting those self-portraits made me a little crazy, but it also taught me so much more about the artists than I could have learned just from looking at their work. I think that's what I found engaging-- the process of becoming.