Self Portraits: The healing power of staring at your face for a long time

Well, the title pretty much says it all. It’s not out of vanity that I love making self portraits. It may, perhaps, be the exact opposite.

I wanted to make a blog post about my art process, but I didn’t want to just talk about how I go about making a piece. As I reflected on the different phases my thoughts go through as I paint or draw, I rested on the profound experiences I’ve had while making self portraits. I’ve made a few over the years, both formally and informally (finished pieces vs. sketches). The first was for my Drawing I class in college. It was a charcoal and chalk drawing on toned paper, and although it was fairly well done, I had not yet developed a philosophy (for lack of a better word) for my art or for my life, and so I can’t really remember having any experience of any sort while making it. In fact, that piece is my least favorite piece.

My second true self portrait was the oil painting in my portfolio here on the website.

This was the final project for my Oil Painting I class, and it is a piece I treasure. This was the first self portrait I made after the first, and between the two I had taken a figure drawing class and all of this oils class. At this point I had grown in maturity, my relationship with Christ, my artistic skills, and my philosophy of art. I had reached profound contemplation through studying the human figure, and I had several moments of encounter with the Lord through the process of making art.

There was still one thing I had not grown in since the first self portrait, and that was love for the beauty of my own face and figure. I could study anyone else’s face or figure and be moved to tears by his or her beauty and the love of God, but I couldn’t look in the mirror and see anything like that in myself. As we all do, I found flaws in my appearance (real or imagined), and had, over the course of several, several years and through the aid of many lies, convinced myself that those “flaws” made me ugly, or weird, or undesirable.

So. My final project was to paint my own face. My professor took the reference photo and picked which one I would use. I remember seeing it printed out and thinking, “Oh, great.” I saw the flaws immediately. My nose was too big, my eyes were a weird distance apart, I had big bags under my eyes that never went away, etc. But I sat down and began my envelope underpainting, filling in the big shadow shapes and then blocking in the rest. A few hours later I had a rough underpainting of a face that looked like my own preconception of what I looked like. But when I stood back from the painting to judge its accuracy to the reference photo, it looked off in proportions. My nose is actually a normal size, and quite beautiful in shape. My eyes aren’t weird, and the “bags” under my eyes aren’t enormous or conspicuous. Actually, the shadows under my eyes created the realistic impression that I had eyeballs, eye-sockets, and cheekbones. Very normal.

At this point, I looked around the room at my classmates to see their self portraits, and I noticed a similar phenomenon happening with them. There were two camps: the one in which the artist painted his/her face as he/she wanted it to look, or the one in which the artist painted his/her face as he/she thought it looked. Both were wrong, and actually made for terrible paintings.

So I set about correcting my painting to be accurate to what I saw on the reference photo. I divorced myself from every conception I had to my own face, and let my eyes see the truth. The shadow shape on my nose is this shape, not that. The curve of my cheek is this, not that. Etc.

And an amazing thing happened. I began to like my own face. I began to actually love it—not in a vain way, but in the way I had been able to love the other faces or figures I had studied in my art. In other words, I was able to see the beauty of God’s creation in myself. And at the end, when I had made a portrait that was true to life, my friends commented that mine was the only one that actually looked like me with all my “flaws” and imperfections and beauty. The others, they said, were idealized versions of the artist.

My journey to a holy self-love (to love one’s neighbor as oneself, one must love oneself) came through my art. When you’re forced to stare at your own face for hours at a time, day after day, you begin to see yourself in a new light—perhaps the light that God sees you in.

This all came to a climax in my final year of college as I finished up my art minor, which required a sculpture class. The one project of this class was a full bust of either an existing sculpture, of a live model’s head, or of your own. I chose to do the self portrait.

This was an experience to outdo all the others. After the oil painting, I thought I had done away with my false notions about my face, but it turns out I still had a lot to learn about my own unique beauty. This project was 3D, so I wasn’t just dealing with my face. I dealt with my whole head, which I realized I also had insecurities about (why am I insecure about the slope of my forehead?). Overcoming these lies and false perceptions about the truth of my appearance was much the same as for the painting, but the real kicker was the medium. See, when you’re kneading clay in your hands and smearing it on a life-size sculpture of your own skull or carving and sculpting the intricate shapes in your ear, you really get into the heart of God. Making art is necessarily a form of meditation. What else can you do as you spend hours working on a piece than think? And what do you have to think about but the very piece you are working on? As I sculpted my own face, I found myself thinking about what it was like for God to do that very thing with my real face in my mother’s womb. Every detail was intentional—my teeny tiny ears, my slanted forehead, my slightly asymmetrical smile—all of it was a deliberate choice God made in crafting me. And as I thought about this, I couldn’t help but feel loved.

So, I’ll end this reflection where I began: the healing power of staring at your face for a long time. It’s healing to be forced to confront your insecurities, fears, doubts, flaws, and, for lack of a better phrase, self-loathing. But it’s not the staring that causes the healing. It’s the truth that you can gain from the staring (if you let yourself), which will naturally lead you to contemplate that truth’s beauty. All glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit!