Art
Wood’s self portrait at Kettle’s Yard
This self-portrait hangs downstairs on the ground floor of the house. Christopher Wood painted it in 1927 and it gave me the perfect inspiration for my self-portrait. For that reason I will be painting mine in a similar way.
This portrait is all about self promotion and self expression, which is how I want to create mine. It tells the viewer about the artist’s characteristics and interests in symbolic ways. I always find symbolic paintings which work well very inspiring as they are easy to understand yet difficult to achieve. To find the symbols in this painting we have to look first at the still life on the left of the subject. A table displays the Artists oil paints , his palette knife and his pipe. These are simple objects dipicting what he likes to do , his characteristics. If we move on to the jumper he is wearing in this painting, one can see it is decorated with a triangular pattern, this is a deeper symbol of his personality. At the time Wood was living in Paris and during the 1920’s theater and circus acts were very popular with both the public and the thriving Paris art scene, you only have to look at the work of Picasso during his rouge period to see this. Harlequins which also often featured in Picasso’s pictures at this time, would wear similar, triangular, pattern’s on their costumes. The colours of the patterned jumper also help direct your eyes towards the next symbol, and that’s the backdrop. The city behind Wood is painted flat like a theater set, using the same colours as those of the jumper. When I took a step back I realised that Wood himself seemed to be projecting out of the composition because of its flat surroundings. The eyes to have an ‘empty’ look and gave me the feeling of a mask like those worn by harlequins in the theater.
This highly expressive use of symbolism is what makes this painting so important. At the time there were but a few english painters which managed to get their name into the paris art scene, this painting symbolises in its-self how Wood was one of those few.