Portraits of an Artist
Or a human-bird hybrid of some kind
On meeting my most recent tattoo artist, he shook my hand and asked, “Are you an artist?” This caught me off guard. I fumbled: “No,” came out first, and this was mostly true. But he looked as though he didn’t believe me, or he expected further explanation, or maybe I just suspected myself of lying. So I blurted, “I’m a poet?” “That counts,” he said.
Wikipedia asserts, “The arts are a wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation.” Thus, it seems we’re all artists here on Medium. Mostly (almost entirely), I’m an artist of the poetic variety, but I have participated in a few visual art classes here and there. Over time, I’ve created a handful of self-portraits through a range of media, from compressed charcoal to typewritten stanzas.
The following two self-portraits are from my college years, and unfortunately I don’t have better photos at the moment (these were downloaded from Facebook). On the left is a pencil sketch done while looking at my face in a mirror and simultaneously looking at a human skull for reference; you can just see bits of bone structure showing through (teeth, nose, eye sockets, cheekbones…). On the right is a mixed media piece in which I painted my face using black ink before adding more detail and background elements in…
