Size: 3.75 x 7 feet
Media: Oil on canvas
Date: May 2004

This description is going to be super long because a lot went into this painting Apologies for the slightly grainy photo, and in real life the floor is a bit less glaringly bright. "Tyria" is an assignment for painting class where we had to do a lifesize self portrait in oil paint. I began this painting around late February and it is the first time I worked on something this large.

I feel like this painting has been a turning point in the way I paint. My past self portraits were painted very thinly and I think this was the result of being afraid of the paint itself, rather than a concious choice. As I worked through this painting I decided to make a point of constantly changing and reworking the surface, to be less afraid of my own art, and as a result there are a ton of layers of thick oil paint, a very rough texture to this canvas. The colors are also much much richer than they used to be.

This is another artwork of mine where there are so many references and meanings that I can't really explain it all, and it's probably best that I don't. A few main ideas were that I wanted to pose myself so that I appear cold and rather regal, but to paint myself so richly that I appear alive on another level. My hands are in a gesture of receiving, specifically inspired by the Christian gesture to receive communion. I painted the reflection in the window so that what was going on was ambiguous, so people could come up with their own interpretations. It is based on the pose in my earlier painting, "double self-portrait -- Merrows," which is in this gallery, where the hands are in another type of "receiving" and giving gesture. A short list of other references/inspirations in this painting: myth of Echo and Narcissus, Gwen John's paintings, the sibyl of cumae (thanks pattie!), symbolism of the color purple (which was originally manufactured in Tyre...hence the title...yay for overly obscure nerdy references), byzantine mosaics

So yeah I can't quite believe this thing is "finished." I really could work on Tyria at infinite length. My one problem with it is that the anatomy of my figure and face is not as good as I know I can do. This is a result of the fact that a lot of this painting was painted from little painting studies rather than life, because I could not reach all the parts of the painting from where I was sitting. I'm going to upload some of these studies and details of this painting too. Well I'll be truly shocked if anyone read all of this...