As a twenty-two-year-old art student, Janice Guy stored a series of experimental self-portraits in a friend’s basement. Now, more than forty years later, they have found a second life.
Pienso que algunos autorretratos funcionan también como álbumes familiares. Desde que empecé a sacar fotos en 2002, siempre jugué con mi hermano para fotografiarlo; lo usé de modelo, lo pintaba, cuando era chiquito lo hacía grande, le dibujaba bigotes, lo vestía de mujer, lo enredaba en hilos de luces. Lo fotografié en nuestras casas, con sus gatitos, con las plantas en una isla en tigre. Jugábamos a imaginarnos cosas y nunca tuve que decirle mucho y siempre se prestó a jugar conmigo. Estas fotos son de 2008, la serie se llamó “lo que hicieron mis padres” y como muchas otras veces, se me apareció el título antes que las fotos. Pensamos, qué saldría de la unión de nuestra mamá y nuestro papá, qué saldrá de la unión entre una libertaria libriana contradictora, bipolar y suicida y un librero amante de las motos con el corazón roto. La respuesta fue el título de la foto, y una intención de ser vampiros que finalmente fuimos zombies. Pienso en liberarme y hacer las fotos y los dibujos que quiera, cuando hice estas no se las mostré a nadie, no las subí a ningún lado, las hice con la libertad de quien está jugando. Hoy me acuerdo de ese juego y me da orgullo. Quiero eso, jugar más y tener la distancia que haga falta para ver los autorretratos que serán álbumes familiares.
Good afternoon.. I’m fighting demons with myself lately. But, some of the fight is just trying to get my brain to stick to the concept that I can love myself even with everything that’s happened to me. It’s hard.
Go to vote.org for directions to your polling places and ballot drop-off boxes. Vote411andBallotpedia are also your friends. They can help you understand the politicians and questions on your ballot.
Here’s to seeing you all on the other side! Hopefully!!
Allow me to recount the extent that I despise myself.
Looking into mirrors has never been a practice of vanity, no matter the hours I’ve lost staring back at the monster I saw. Illustrations too close to what I am in reality holds no amount of aesthetic merit to me. Family albums are still devoid of years of my life from the fervency I duck out of photos, untag myself on social media, and conveniently crop myself out of.
As much as dysmorphia and disordered eating has dictated that I reject myself, so much of my existence has been poured into that self-hatred. I want to change. I’ve wanted to change since middle school. But recovery is a painful cycle of breaking free, stepping forward, and faltering back into those shadows.
Sometimes, all I can do is hide, and fall apart in isolation.
With the rollout of the new model of the Galaxy Note and a phone upgrade I’ve been waiting very patiently to cash in on, I finally got myself the mobile workstation I’ve wanted for years. I was nervous about the size of the stylus and sensitivity, but woof. My new baby blows my poor old Intuos out of the water, and the S Pen is the perfect size for my extraordinarily tiny hands.
I’ve been doing some pretty furious testing with art apps. I’m still blown away by how far digital art has come on mobile. As disappointed as I am that CSP isn’t on Android, I’ve absolutely fallen in love with ArtFlow (example: sepia tone sketch) and Infinite Painter (literally everything else). The former is extraordinarly similar to PaintTool Sai, and the latter is Clip Studio Paint’s little sibling with an emphasis on illustration and brush customizability. I uhhhhhh accidentally corrupted Infinite Painter app with a custom brush I made that had to be summarily ejected from my phone, but it’s been incredible having touch screen functionality and gesture commands.
Life becomes shockingly bearable once you stop fighting your body and listening to its natural rhythms and patterns.
I was diagnosed with delayed sleep phase syndrome at 18. I didn’t know what to do with the label then, and it meant little to my medical team. We live in a world the upholds the 9 to 5 as the norm; anything outside of that is strange and a show of poor character. I’d already been through the process of drugging myself into resting and propping myself up with stimulants since age 8, so that just continued with highly mixed success.
However, I was forced off of the medication dictating an artificial sleep schedule earlier this year. Trying to uphold an early start time was destroying me. I was delirious from lack of sleep, my mental health was an active danger to me, the side effects of the medication were harming my body, and I was functioning, as a whole, worse and worse before 4pm.
While a bedtime of 8am initially made me feel guilty, the difference it’s made in my wellbeing is astounding. People really do need to sleep, and not everybody can sleep at the same times. Myself included! I’ve since embraced being nocturnal, and I now enjoy working late at night while the rest of the world is quiet.
It’s nice to finally not punish myself for needing something.
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone, I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.” ― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.” ― Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back
I’m looking for self-portrait photographers. It occurred to me today that at one point, most of the people I knew online were self-portrait artists - it’s how we all met. Faye Daniels, Jack Scoresby, Molly Broxton, Jacs Fishburne, J.R. Blackwell, so many of my favourite people I met because we had all turned the camera on ourselves. But now I feel like I’m not really finding many new people doing it? Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places?
If you follow any self-portrait artists on Tumblr can you let me know who they are?
