Christmas Is All Around Us

So, I fell asleep unexpectedly at 9 o’clock last night and missed my big debut back at my blog. But technically I can still make my goal of 100 posts in 100 days if I blog twice tonight. 😛

It’s been a refreshing “break” not to be writing in my blog every day for the past week. It was more challenging than I thought it would be to make up my mind what to post, where to get it, whether I wanted it to mean anything…it was kind of like brainstorming in some ways. But it was still easier than trying to put words together into coherent sentences every night.

My most pleasant surprise during my hiatus was that my page hits remained consistent even while I wasn’t writing and wasn’t posting any blog links on facebook. Must be all the kitten pictures I was posting.

Anyway, it’s time to get back to writing and photo-ing. I’ve decided to take on another little “project” this week to get myself back into the swing of things. Inspired by a popular self-portraiture trend on Flickr called 365 Days, I’ve decided to go for a little less than 2% of that ambition and do 7 Days of self-portraits.

Self-portraits are a funny thing. Really, any artist can consider any form of her art to be a self-portrait, if she so chooses. In art school I frequently did series of self-portraits that were actually photographs of books, and didn’t include any physical part of myself. In a self-portrait you can paint yourself in any light you choose, to the best of your skill and ability. A self-portrait can say some really deep, meaningful things, or a self-portrait can just end up making you look really vain. It’s a fine line to walk sometimes, though some are more consistently successful than others at looking completely full of themselves.

Students and artists are widely divided on the subject of self-portraiture. For some it comes easily and naturally, while others struggle with being in front of the camera lens, and will do anything to avoid it. Myself, I’ve always found it much easier to photograph myself than to photograph other people, and I was usually the most convenient and manageable prop available in any given situation. But it’s been a long time since I tried to take any of those typical art-school cliche “expressive” pics of myself. Maybe a few will pop up in the next several days, who knows.

To kick off my week, I’ve dug up some of those old familiar and favorite self-portraits that others have done, and some new ones I’ve recently discovered.