Self Portrait Global Love In Challenge

Self Portrait No.5, Cherry Chin
acrylic on 6" by 8" canvas board
nfs, my personal collection

There is a lot of story to tell. I started Daily Painting in February. During that month, I read on a painting board on WetCanvas about one new artist that challenged himself to paint a self portrait everyday for one month. I thought what a good exercise!

I had my daughter Mary Ellen come over and I used several wigs to create various looks. We took over 100 shots and about 10 of them were really good. Another 20 or 30 were very useful in painting self portraits.

In this image, I was wearing a waist-length "vamp" wig. The over-all look of this wig was not useful for painting self portraits, it just doesn't look natural enough and besides that, it is a ridiculous wig! But this photo, I thought was, was fun.

After painting my version, A Greener Jimmy, of Jimmy Wright's Self Portrait with Green Hand, I wondered what I'd look like done in vibrant colors. Well, I'm glad to say I really liked it and it has become one of my signature pieces.

Then in May, I found David Lobenberg's Self Portrait Global Love In which I wrote about in my May 22 post Art Challenges. I love self portraits so I jumped right in and contacted Mr. Lobenberg. I sent mine in on June 1st, I was so excited. I received a confirmation and when the challenge was posted, mine was not included. I wasn't sure if it was an oversite or if there was going to be additional postings over a period of time. I knew Mr. Lobenberg had spent a great amount of time working on this project and it had turned out to be very popular with over 50 entries. But I needed to know if something had been wrong with mine. Here are the wonderful words he wrote on the Blog about my inquiry.

"(...) I even missed posting (to date) two portraits...nuts?? (...) Also, I missed posting Beckie Saar Leone's wonderfully colorful and expressive SP. She emailed me wanting to know if there was something wrong with hers...hell no!"

I don't know what Mr. Lobenberg's plans are for continuing this challenge in the future, but I hope it is an ongoing project. It was very successful and a lot of fun.

I can't leave the subject of Self Portraits without including a site artist Fred Bell told us about on Facebook, the 5th Annual National Self-Portrait Exhibition. There are some incredible self portraits there, a must see if you also love self portraits.

And finally, a note about "Cherry Chin". As my daughter and I were growing up together, we frequently noted how different we look from each other. She is a beautiful female version of her father! Somehow, we developed the nicknames for each other "Cherry Chin" and "Shovel Chin". I'll leave those images with you!

Say goodnight, Cherry Chin