Inspiration
Sandro Botticelli
For this self-portrait, I knew that I wanted to create a somewhat ethereal mood with a smooth painting style. I ultimately chose to base this painting on the work of Italian artist Sandro Botticelli, who fits these criteria perfectly and has been an inspiration of mine for quite some time. Botticelli is considered to be one of the most brilliant Renaissance painters of all time, particularly due to his beautiful, intricate yet soft style of painting. His technique is especially highlighted in The Birth of Venus, one of his most famous works that features strong use of linear perspective, complex composition, flowing forms, and pale hues. The story behind the piece is inspired ancient poet Homer, who wrote that Venus, the goddess of love, beauty and procreation, was born out of foam and rode on a seashell to the island of Cytheria. Although I knew going in that my self-portrait would be quite dark in nature, I was inspired by Botticelli to not shy away from implementing this sense of beauty, delicacy, and glory into a victim of trauma in light of the serious subject matter.
Ethel Cain While contemplating my overall concept and the mood I wanted to create for my piece, I was deeply inspired by the work of American singer, songwriter, and music producer Hayden Anhedönia, otherwise known as her persona Ethel Cain. Cain’s debut album entitled Preacher’s Daughter follows the story of Ethel’s character, a young woman who attempts to escape the burdens of her religious trauma and abuse by traveling across the United States and forming codependent, often dangerous relationships with various men, with the story ending in her murder and cannibalization by one of her partners. I was especially inspired by her song Ptolemaea in which her murder is actually depicted through the use of poetic lyrics and incredibly eerie and powerful musical production. The song is named after Ptolomea, the final circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno, and is genuinely one of the most terrifying pieces of music I have ever listened to. I felt that this type of music encapsulates the feeling of being threatened and vulnerable to its greatest extent, and wanted to consider it as I depicted my own response to these feelings within my painting. |
Planning
In order to plan for this painting, I needed to brainstorm ways that I could implement bits of Botticelli’s art style into my work, as well as how I could translate Ethel’s music to a visual format. To begin, I did some partial studies of Botticelli’s iconic painting, The Birth of Venus. I practiced completing graphite sketches of characters from the painting, including the iconic Venus herself. These sketches really refreshed my memory on how to draw people in a semi-realistic way, and helped me to better invision the ways I would incorporate the softness of Botticelli’s painting into my own. Alongside this, I did a miniature self-portrait just to practice drawing my own features. There is also a study shown from the piece Children’s Games by Dorothea Tanning, however, I ended up not using her work as inspiration in this painting despite the themes of childhood innocence that intrigued me in the beginning of my planning stage. Next, I started sketching out ideas I’d come up with for different visuals in the piece, experimenting with a color palette, positioning of the body, hands, and head. I knew that I wanted to incorporate some form of physical restrain into my painting, and drew out a couple of ways I might showcase restricted use of my hands, aiming for something disturbing and jarring to emphasize the negative impacts of traumatic events. |
Ultimately, I chose to have my concept revolve around the aftermath of trauma, the tension it leaves in the body and its interference with day-to-day life in the worst of cases. While overall, I want the piece to be a representation of post-traumatic stress disorder that is universal for all sufferers, I also wanted to depict the phenomenon of the freeze response, a personal symptom I experience that leaves me paralyzed when difficult situations arise. My feelings towards this can be visually represented best with my self-portrait showing my hands crossing over one another, being bludgened and nailed together. A scenario like this would hypothetically leave any person feeling helpless with nothing to grab onto, both literally and metaphorically, and that is exactly what I want to convey in this piece. With influences from the classic, luminescent work of Sandro Botticelli, and the eerie, yet ethereal music of Ethel Cain, I wanted to use oil paints to create a self-portrait honing in on the debilitating impacts of PTSD while also highlighting beauty that remains in spite of trauma. |
Once I had planned out my concept, I created my final sketch for this piece. Centered on the 3 x 3 ft canvas would be an image of myself, from my head and down to my waist. I am wearing a white and flowy blouse, hanging my head over to the righthand side with my hands up above, crossed over each other and nailed together with bits of blood pouring out. Behind me is a solid black background, which appears much like a void, perhaps hinting towards the absence of rational thought during a trauma response. After completing the sketch, I jotted down a wide range of notes on things that I wanted to both keep and improve, considering how I could further implement my inspirations and intensify the piece more on the actual canvas.
Process
Once my canvas had been stretched, coated in gesso, and I’d used my planning sketches to outline the entire painting, it was time to apply my base layers, starting with the skin. I used a mixture of mostly white with a small amount of red and yellow paint to replicate my pale skin tone and began filling in my face, arms, and parts of my hands, and then started trying to create dimension by blending in shades of brown, black, and grey for shadowing. As a first-time oil painter, I’d read that it is easier to start out with the darker tones before working your way up to the light ones, which I found to be accurate, but I initially had applied way too many dark, greyish hues to the face to the point where I could not add any brightness to the face until the paint had dried. Because of this, I needed to wait roughly 24 hours to start painting the face again, so in the meantime, I focused on the hair, starting out with shades of black and grey, this time much lighter, and then blending in some brown color from dark to light.
Once the first coating of paint had dried onto the canvas, I once again worked on the face. I started trying to bring a little bit of color back into the face, starting by going over the areas in which I’d outlined the facial structure with a warm brown, and slowly reincorporating flesh tones throughout. I painted over the creases and folds of skin around the eyes, the jawline, temples, and any indents around the nose or mouth. Over time, the face started to look much more like I had aimed for it to. I diminished some of the shadows of the bone structure to make it appear less harsh, but left a moderate amount on the right side and added white highlights to important areas such as the tip of the nose, chin, and the left cheek, to imply the direction of a light source. These additions really helped the face look more accurate to my own and helped the piece appear much less flat.
Once I was happy with these adjustments to the face, I started working on smaller features like the eyeballs and mouth. I filled in the eyes with a light grey and partially blended them into the skin to make them appear slightly sunken, then mixed together a hazel-type color for the irises, subtly highlighting them with white and the using a darker gray to emphasize a somewhat lifeless look that matches the rest of the face. As for the mouth, I started by filling the lips in with a pink flesh tone and making careful brushstrokes at the creases and doing some mild blending as to make them a little bit softer. Of course, after this I dabbed some very small amounts of white paint near the edges of the mouth to highlight them as well.
After finishing the entire face, I looped back around to the hair. I filled out the bangs and top of the scalp with a tad bit browner and hints of beige, darkened up the hair on the very edges of the face, and then added some details to imply various strands of hair. I painted very thin, organic lines using warm browns, greyish browns, shades of beige, and a very tiny amount of “blond” color near just the ends to give the hair just as much dimension as I did the face. With the hair complete, I started to paint the clothing that I am wearing in the self-portrait. Since the blouse I am wearing in the painting is completely white, this was mostly a matter of indicating shadows and folds in the fabric, and I did so by building up grey tones with values ranging from almost completely white to fairly dark. I was able to convey indents in the clothing by subtly adding light greys against darker greys, giving the impression of a fold. I also incorporated some shading in the areas wrapping around the arms and waist to further establish dimension in the piece.
Next, I went back to adding layers of paint to the other areas where skin is shown: the hands and arms. I simply used more grey to darken up the edges and other various parts, such as the beginning of the upper arms, the elbows, wrists, palms, and parts of the fingers that did not extend outward. On the arms, I blended these shadows quite thoroughly, but for the hands, I allowed for more contrast as that was the way they appeared in real life and in my sketches. It took many layering attempts until I was satisfied with the hands, as I wanted them to be shaded accurately, but I also did not want to make the features unrecognizable. Eventually, however, I found a happy medium and used a light grey mid-tone to balance out the shadows and highlights in the hands. |
To finish off the piece, all I needed to do was fill in the solid black background. I used my largest paintbrush to cover as much space in as little time as possible, and made sure to outline the edges of the figure carefully. I also attempted to partially blend the background into the figure’s edges so they could better complement each other. The completely black background provided contrast but also effectively became one with the rest of the self-portrait. |
Finally, I made sure to cover up the ends of my canvas with black, soften or sharpen any edges, and add any extra highlights and shadows that I may have missed. Once I’d made these minor tweaks and was happy with the overall product, my painting was done!
Critique
Some differences would be…
- Art form. While my painting and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus are both works of visual art, there is a difference in art form in that my piece is visual, while Cain’s is musical.
- Medium. Although The Birth of Venus and my piece are both paintings, my painting was done entirely in oil paint, whereas Botticelli’s was done using tempera paint.
- Artist’s purpose. Both Botticelli and Cain’s pieces are portrayals of fictional characters, Venus being a goddess from Greek mythology and Ethel being a persona of Anhedönia’s. On the other hand, my piece is a painting of myself and deals with my personal experiences managing trauma.
Reflection
All in all, this self-portrait is a project that I’m extremely proud of and is perhaps one of my favorite paintings I’ve ever made. This was my first time ever working with oil paints, and while it took me some time to develop a consistent technique and learn how to paint efficiently, I feel that by the time I’d actually finished the painting I was so much more confident in my skills. Something that also helped me was how passionate I was about my inspiration; I was super excited to connect a more personal theme to one of my favorite painters, as well as to one of my favorite musical artists, and this project was a great outlet for me to express my thoughts and feelings regarding each of those things together. If there were one thing I’d like to change it would probably be some slight adjustments in the hands, as I feel that they aren’t necessarily as detailed as the rest of the painting and I’d like to revisit them. I also wish I would have given myself more time on this painting to develop my technique even further, but I think I did a nice job implementing smooth textures, as well as a balanced color palette. Overall, I’m quite satisfied with this piece and this has motivated me to continue working with oils in the future!
Connecting to the ACT
1.) Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause effect relationship between your inspiration and its effect on your artwork.
The soft, ethereal, worshipping nature of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus inspired me to create a piece that showcased glory and beauty in a person, even in a trauma sufferer. Ethel Cain’s album Preacher’s Daughter, and especially her song Ptolemaea, inspired me to convert the fear, vulnerability, and traumatic themes of her music to a visual format that related more particularly to me.
2.) What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus was painted with the intention of celebrating the gracefulness of Venus: the Greek goddess of love and beauty, while Ethel Cain’s album Preacher’s Daughter was written with the intention of telling the story of a young woman’s life, influenced by various traumatic events.
3.) What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
I came to the conclusion that beauty does not always need to be clean-cut, and that beauty can be found even in disturbing imagery, whether it be an ethereal tone set to a song that plants disturbing thoughts in one’s head, and that adding elements of beauty and grace to a piece can add more depth to the feelings associated with that piece, regardless of how light or dark the subject matter is.
4.) What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
The theme generally revolves around trauma and is a visual representation of a common trauma response that many, including myself, have experienced.
5.) What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
I realized how powerful music is in that it can create a story in one’s mind. In my case, I was able to picture the story of the Preacher’s Daughter album so vividly that I was able to actually come up with an entire concept for this piece inspired by it. I’ve also inferred that there is a lot to learn from more classical, attractive-looking paintings; even if your own work doesn’t necessarily match that style, incorporating selective elements from that style can make a piece more intriguing.
MLA Citations
“Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.” ItalianRenaissance.Org, www.italianrenaissance.org/botticelli-birth-of-venus/. Accessed 12 May 2023.
Ethel Cain. “Preacher’s Daughter.” Ethel Cain, Matthew Tomasi, 12 May 2022.
Kearney, Michael. “The Dark Story of Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter.” The Stony Brook Press, 18 Mar. 2023, sbpress.com/2023/03/the-dark-story-of-ethel-cains-preachers-daughter/.
Lightbown, Ronald W. “Sandro Botticelli.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 6 May 2023, www.britannica.com/biography/Sandro-Botticelli.
Ethel Cain. “Preacher’s Daughter.” Ethel Cain, Matthew Tomasi, 12 May 2022.
Kearney, Michael. “The Dark Story of Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter.” The Stony Brook Press, 18 Mar. 2023, sbpress.com/2023/03/the-dark-story-of-ethel-cains-preachers-daughter/.
Lightbown, Ronald W. “Sandro Botticelli.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 6 May 2023, www.britannica.com/biography/Sandro-Botticelli.