“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”  - Thomas Merton

Throughout the 12th grade year in the Waldorf art curriculum, students explore the question “Who am I?” through visual interpretation. Self-portraiture insists that the artist embarks on a journey of self-exploration in order to make decisions about how to represent themselves authentically. The students are asked to consider that a self-portrait is not merely an exercise in realistic representation, but a psychological study of themselves and a potent act of self-expression. To begin the self-portraits, my students write a visual description of themselves, create several “blind contour” drawings, and study their individual facial features in isolation of each other. The final portrait is a life-sized drawing in graphite on gessoed paper. The goal of these drawings is to form realistic facial features and capture individualistic expressions through shading, lines and drawn textures.

Below are examples of my students’ self-portraits over the years.