Anxiety
January-February 2022
The artistic language and composition of this piece was inspired by Krisztian Tejfel’s portrait paintings. The concept behind my portrait is to show the anxious and disquieting nature of my personality. I chose to layer various portraits and details on top of a flesh tone background to allude to this idea of delamination - where I am exposed, vulnerable, and fading into the atmosphere. This piece is titled anxiety, because currently I am in this moment in my young adulthood where I have to make stressful, life-changing decisions and deep down I still feel like a kid. I’m dealing with a lot of juxtapositions - excitement and fear, preparedness and anxiety, responsibility and freedom – and as I near graduation, I find myself stuck in this rut, where I’m not sure what I want to do next and I’m feeling a lot of pressure. I wanted to emphasize these moments of glitching where I find myself paralyzed in stress and nerves through subtle distortions in the lips, and by isolating certain mouth and eye details. In the 2nd version of my portrait, I wanted to push the transparencies to emphasize how my anxiety will consume me into the background – if I don’t take a chance, I’ll just fade away and will have missed out on an exciting, new chapter in life. Overall, I took this piece as an opportunity to show how subtle elements of emotions can reveal the vulnerable nature of my personality and disquieting moments of anxiety.
