Who am I ?

Introduction
Art and writing can help people to understand themselves better, because they want to show to other people, who don’t know them, who they are. In this case I’m talking about self-portraits, diaries, letters or autobiographies. You can only show who you are when you know the answer yourself, so you have to find out what you want to show of yourself, and in what kind of way.
The answer on the question ‘Who am I?’ can vary from time to time, even though it’s answered by the same person. It is not always the case, but mostly when you grow up, from a baby to a child, to an adolescent and eventually an adult, your behaviour changes, together with your feelings, thoughts and your view on life. Maybe at a certain point in life you had a hard time, because someone you truly cared about passed away or another sad thing happened, and you felt down, disappointed and miserable. This can also influence the answers on these questions.

Vincent van Gogh
In Van Gogh’s self-portrait from 1888 he is painting, he looks very serious and concentrated. I think he wants to show that he doesn’t just paint for fun, that he takes it serious and wants people to take him serious for who he is and what he does.Looking at his self-portrait from 1889, two ‘manipulated’ versions have been made.
The version of the self-portrait with the muted colours makes it look even more sad and depressed, because there was just some colour in his face, but in the ‘muted version’ this is also dark and greyish. The version of the self-portrait with the brushstrokes smoothed out makes the painting look more calm, there’s less going on, it’s less chaotic.
If you compare the dark-blue and light-blue self-portraits from 1889, I feel that Van Gogh appears calmer in the dark blue self-portrait, because the strokes in the background are ‘just’ straight, while the background of the light blue self-portrait has a lot of waves and circles going on, which makes it seem restless. I think this is because the light blue self-portrait has been made after his recovery, so he had a lot of energy and felt like he had to do something, and he expressed his restlessness in different kinds of figures in the background.
Vincent van Gogh is a typical painter. If you see one of his paintings hanging between other ones, you can easily distinguish which one is a Van Gogh and which one is not. You can easily recognize Van Gogh’s work by his rhythmic patterns of thick brushstrokes and the complimentary colours used in his paintings. For example yellow against purple and blue against orange. Both these techniques make the canvas seem to vibrate, that there goes something on, on that flat piece of canvas.

Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin was a very complicated person. You could only get to know him if you studied his self-portraits and letters. To him, art was very important, it was a kind of outlet to show his feelings and emotions, and everything he had gone through.
From the letters Gauguin had written, you can understand that he tries to tell what he thinks is so important about being an artist, about painting. He clearly states that one’s personality is expressed in the way the painting is made. With just one or two extra brushstrokes here and there you can create a totally different emotion or feeling.
Gauguin’s self-portrait dedicated to Carrière from 1888 or 1889, originally has lots of dark shadows in his face. The dark circles under his eyes make him look very tired and exhausted. The dark parts under his nose, along his jaw line and on his forehead make him look old.
When you clicked on the picture, these shadows disappeared. You then got a total different self-portrait. He looked awake and more happy, like he’s less concerned about the thing he probably was in the painting with the shadows.

Judith Leyster
Judith Leyster is one of the greatest female painters of those times. It was hard to make it in the men’s world being a woman, but she did. She is anything but shy, in the painting she looks straight at you, with a warm glance but still confident. She was also very proud of her own work. Once she said: “I’m a highly skilled, talented and successful painter, and I’m happy and ready to work for you.”All this is true, she was talented and successful, and above that all very skilled, while she wasn’t academically educated.

Conclusion: why do artists make self-portraits?
By making self-portraits, artists discover who they really are, because they want to show that to other people. They have to ask themselves, how do I want to present myself? Must I look happy or sad and what kind of background and what kind of clothes match the emotion I want to get across? Artists make self-portraits to learn more about themselves.