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Have you ever heard a song that reminded you of a person or a place or a time? Art can do the same thing; it can even remind you of yourself. Different styles of art speak to different people differently. Which type of art speaks to you?
Perhaps you are an impressionist who looks at things in a new way.
The term impressionism comes from a painting by Claude Monet.
The painting titled Impression Sunrise depicts sunlight dancing
and shimmering on water. Impressionists look at the effects of light
on objects, and in their paintings they try to capture an immediate
impression of what the eye sees rather than what the viewer knows
or feels about the subject.
Are you emotional and expressive? Do you appreciate pictures that
reveal emotions and the types of responses those same emotions evoke?
Expressionists throw out the traditional pictures of nature and
instead choose vibrant colors, abstract shapes, and emotional subject
matter. If you see yourself in Edvard Munch's The Scream,
perhaps you are an expressionist.
Do you like to take things apart and rebuild them? If so, you may
be a cubist. Introduced by well-known artists Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque, the term cubism comes from comments about
Braque's 1908 work Houses at L'Estaque. This painting was
said to look like a bunch of cubes. In cubist works, artists either
"take apart" objects and reshape them with the use of flat intersecting
planes, or they integrate original objects, such as bits of newspaper
clippings and rope, into their art.
Or perhaps you are a dadaist, and you think art means nothing and
has no purpose. In dadaism, usual, everyday objects are altered
ever so slightly and called "art." Marcel Duchamp's Fountain
is a good example of dadaism. Dadaists are truly rebel artists!
If you are fascinated with the strange, you may be a surrealist.
Surrealists emphasize the unconscious, with artists often drawing
on images seen in dreams or dream-like states. Salvador Dali in
particular was very much interested in dreams. This is quite clear
in his piece titled The Persistence of Memory.
Regardless of the style, every painting tells a different story to each person who looks at it. What story would you want your self-portrait to tell?
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