"Self-portrait with Scanner", digital image, 2000This is not a painting, but a self-portrait with hand-held scanner. As usual, was just playing around with a newly-discovered tool, but in making this self-portrait there came a moment when I understood it to be an important part of the healing process.
The underlying question to answer is this: how do you see yourself?
Learned the import of that question from sculptor Petah Coyne.
My then-shrink had asked me what I looked like inside. I'd no answer.
Shortly thereafter I had occasion to see a collection of Ms. Coyne's work at the Norton Gallery of Art in West Palm Beach. Her sculptures of tar, razor wire and straw represented precisely my image of self.
Needless to say, it came as a kind of revelation that I thought of myself in that dark way.
No way to change something you're not conscious of.
Consciousness of self-image is an early step toward changing it.
How do YOU see yourself?
Thanks, Petah.
[Petah Coyne BIO]
[Coyne Exhibit]
Tags:
Self-Help Art Depression
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