ABSTRACT SELF PORTRAITS
After Amedeo Modiglianie
Studying other artists.....
In this unit, students will be studying the styles of famous artists and interpreting their ideas into their own work.
The student to the left followed the work of Amedeo Modigliani. She interpreted his style into her own portrait that included aspects of her own culture.
This student did several variations on Modigliani’s style. When copying the style of another artist, the title can be: “After Modigliani,” or in the case of her self portrait above, “after David Hockney.”
After Hundertwasser
These students followed the work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser for their approach to a self portrait. Hunterdwasser is often used by students and interpreted many different ways.
The work above was done by a ninth-grade student was from Norway. She replaced the landscape of Vienna in Hunterdwasser’s painting with the city-scape and harbor of Stavanger.
After Gustav Klimt
Students loved the painting style of Gustav Klimt and several girls adapted his ideas to their self portraits
After Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol
The pop styles of the 1960’s were popular with many students.
Self portraits are always more than what someone looks like. Below, a student painted this portrait, “After Lucian Freud.”
After SandroBotticeli
In all of these units, students researched the artists they were attracted to, made practice media experiments and worked on several provisional models.
Many of these expamples used mixed media; for example, printmaking combined with stencilling and drawing with pen and ink, as is done here.
This student combined a classical image with graffiti.
Inevitably, students express profound symbols that represent themselves. This student was powerfully cerebral. The image she created with the Chinese dragons, is a version of the Greek Medusa, a Gorgon who has snakes coming out of her head. Medusa is on the breastplate of Athena, who was born out the head of Zeus. You can’t get more cerebral than that!
The self portraits below are not fashioned after another artist, but grew out of the student’ own experience and style of working.
The same student painted both of these self-portraits. Any logical meaning may be obscure, but the expressive power of these works is remarkable.
