I have procrastinated on this task for some time, undecided on whether to complete it in the form of self-portraiture or painting on the self. In the spirit of Being Not Half-Assed, I did both.


As for portraiture, it must be noted that the bulk of my formal artistic training focuses on design for theatre (it must also be noted that said training is many years old and I am lousy with paint). Thus buildings and objects are carefully drafted, lighting can be intensely and unnaturally coloured, and, most importantly for this task, people are clay to scale with their surroundings, often facially unidentifiable (for your actor may be unknown or unseen or, worse, rotating), and defined by their costume. I like to pretend it was the years in theatre design that spawned my fixation with "me-costumes", the few and distinct outfits people would wear in plays about their lives, rather than, say, my shameful love of comic superheroes and villains. Watching these costumes is a good deal of my love of Burning Man events. To paint myself is thus to paint myself as the actor in the most current of the me-costumes I have constructed or acquired over the years; I am the unique intersection of these ridiculous characters. (As far as I can tell, this intersection includes pre-Raphaelite hair, the wrong sort of skirt to be adventuring in, and very large boots.)

As for painting on the self, I then decided to paint the more convenient of said costumes in a rather different medium. Or, at least, the parts of it that were vaguely achievable to manage on myself....