Lava Lamp Self-Portrait

This piece was created as the final project for Intermediate Painting, a course I took as an undergraduate student at Juniata College.

For this assignment, we were challenged with assembling our own canvas (including stapling together the frame, stretching the canvas over the frame, and covering the stretched canvas in the traditional Gesso base). We were required to paint a self-portrait based on a photo reference of ourselves, but were otherwise free to do whatever else we wanted.

I chose to stray from the motifs and themes I usually explore in my art, and chose instead to create a self-portrait that portrayed my creative nature, having been a self-taught artist for the majority of my life. To create my reference photo, I first took a photo of myself, then photoshopped bubbles from images of lava lamps to create colorful volumes floating around me. I specifically positioned a smaller bubble to be coming from my mouth, as though the "creativity" was literally flowing out of me.

Truthfully, I do not consider this piece completely "finished." I was forced to submit the assignment due to the impending end of the semester, but given more time, I would add more layers of paint to create a smoother transition between the shadows and colors; especially on my skin, which looks particularly "patchy" and poorly-blended with only one layer of paint.

The still photo below depicts the final illustration; the embedded YouTube video showcases a series of "work-in-progress" photos that I took throughout the creation of the piece.