Circles of Time in Self-Portraits

My brother Dorn’s recent post about the circles of time (see it here) somehow made me think of a self portrait I made back around 1980. At the time, my Dad and I were both studying portraiture at the Torpedo Factory with Danni Dawson. The self-portrait on the left is something I did back then and I remember my Dad thinking I had over-aged my twenty-something self in the painting. “Maybe in 50 years you’ll look like that!”, he said. I guess I did pass through that phase at some point. Just thinking about the time passage made me realize that now is the time to do some more self-portraits – it’s not like I’m going to look any better in another 50 years!

The self-portrait on the right is my recent effort. Interestingly, it is inspired by the long dead Swedish artist, Anders Zorn, whom I have somehow been following on Instagram. I’ve been wanting to try something called the Zorn palette. Back when we studied with Danni, she was always pushing us to use more color and we didn’t even have black on our palette so we could make it out of colors. Anders Zorn is just the opposite and had an amazingly simple four color palette: black, white, cadmium red and yellow ochre. That’s it! I know they say the ancients didn’t see the color blue, but how odd to leave it out. My usual palette includes not only blue, but it still has all the colors Danni taught us to use. These colors you need for portrait painting, she said, were the same colors that you would use to paint a McIntosh apple. So it was a challenge for me to approach a self-portrait using just the Zorn palette. I kept thinking I would have to cheat, but I didn’t! – even though I fell short in getting my hair as purple as I like!