Skin, Soul, Spirit

I see myself in three parts: as body, as spirit, and as soul. These are three different states of being that I wanted to represent in this self-visualization triptych, three aspects that are as true to me as the here and now. Though the latter (soul and spirit) are far more abstract, I wanted to convey them with the same reality as the physical realm, which is why I challenged myself to integrate a portrait in each panel. Since this concept is, in a way, my life on display, I decided to set it up as a painting within a painting. The panel and the frame in the image come from my home (they were separate photographs), making a clear reference to my life and my present state. But since my view of body, soul, and spirit has been shared by many before me, I resolved to make some clear-cut references to the past. This is why I decided to have myself photographed in late medieval/renaissance wear, allowing me also to make some subtle references to the origin of the triptych through the content of each “painting”.

To represent the body, you have a typical portrait with a typical landscape in the background. It is one of little emotion, where surface appearance is showcased: my eyes directed at the viewer, with a hand gently resting on a tree to emphasize physicality. In next panel, I wanted to convey the very nature of the soul as our emotional being. I took two shots of myself, one joyful, the other saddened, and put them back to back. I placed this on an autumnal background – the changing colors and falling leaves representative of the fleeting and inconsistent nature of emotions. Finally, the third panel is the spirit. This is the part of me I see as everlasting, the part of me that reaches for my God… for my true Father and my true home. I didn’t want to set myself in a regular landscape, so I chose to set myself among sky and light. My eyes are fixed in an upward gaze and my hands are held out, with a ray of light symbolic of the offering of all I am. Though I see this panel as the most important, I chose to make it the third to keep with the flow as the “layers” my being are pulled back.

The panel, the frame, and the paintings are all photographs worked in both Illustrator and Photoshop. Any harsh lines, text or graphics would detract from the painterly feel, so I did 75% of the work inside the paintings on Photoshop. Each photograph of myself was cropped, edited, put through various filters, edited some more, and painted over. I put each part into illustrator as well, but the graphic look was simply not successful despite my many attempts. Each background (within the painting) went through the same process. The first one is a photograph of a part of an actual painting, but the tree my hand is resting on is from a totally separate photograph of a real tree. Integrating that into a real painting was probably the trickiest part! The backgrounds of the other two paintings are photographs I worked with (again, with color, filters, and brush painting). The largest area of the work – the panel and the frame of the painting – translated very nicely as a vectorized image, which also keeps the piece very clean and pixel-free. At the same time, I discovered that illustrator provides the exact filters as photoshop does… only on illustrator, they seem to produce better effects!
To finish off, I constructed three actual frames from plywood mouldings, which I painted with gold-leaf. Not only did it further the “painting within a painting” feel, but it also produced the look of the traditional triptych when hung side by side. Overall, the most fun I've had in both photoshop and illustrator all semester!