Proposed (Assignment 1: Psychological Self-Portrait)

 Here's my psychological self-portrait, titled Proposed (like all of those classes on the chart that I haven't taken yet).

(I nearly brought Photoshop to its knees with all of the layer masks I used for this.)

The deadline for this psychological self-portrait assignment marks the end of my first month at college. In acknowledgement of this occasion, I have made my portrait to illustrate a snap-shot of my perspective of the world at this particular point in time.  I feel that as a Freshman in college I am suspended far too precariously above a sea of disappointing outcomes while simultaneously facing a looming but unpredictable future. I molded this portrait around that theme, using a rusty bridge leading into the multifaceted abyss of my degree audit chart to portray the concept.

I went to the woods to gather photographs for this portrait because I love the wild things there. I also chose feathers and pressed flowers to scan. These fine, concrete things seemed appropriate because I tend to focus on the detailed aspects of life before looking at the bigger picture. By placing some of these smaller things in the foreground of my portrait, I hoped to show different levels of perception. I also wanted to illustrate how concentrating on the small things can be at once complementing of and distracting from the whole. The yellow flower is a stalk of forsythia scanned on the phone book page from which it could not be removed. This is the origin of the phone numbers written beneath the petals.

In the background, I used a photograph of a hen to draw the eye to the linear nature of the bridged path to my audit chart. She stands, perhaps not totally confident in the situation, on an old rusty trolley bridge; looking at the dark water beneath and the future ahead. I used both abysmal inky-blackness and scans of blooming magnolia flowers to form the black hole of the unpredictable. These are elements of my future as I see it now; promises of new beginnings mingled with contaminating uncertainty. Thank goodness for the small things!

Just for fun, here's the before picture: