Deliberate hard outlines and selected shading of the face sits in contrast to plain white backgrounds. This way, my portraits tend to isolate the person on the page, taking away the context of their surroundings to give importance to their gaze. I draw my pieces from digital images I pick out – either selfies of people close to me or me. This is an essential aspect of my work because these images are picked by their ‘appeal’ value; most of them would make it to the world of social media. Traditionally, commissions of portraits would represent the likeliness, legacy and various other parts of a person. However, the invention of the camera made people move beyond these values. Now, it is the selfie that takes on the task of creating a deliberate image that reflects how a person wishes to be perceived.

Thus, the portrait entails a new meaning in our culture. Therefore, from the process of picking an image to the close observation of it during the drawing process, I explore how portraiture has changed. The digital selfie is dominating our culture, but closer inspection gives way to break this cycle. I interpret the posed image through the process of drawing it; the image is decontextualised and is open for scrutiny regarding its core values – the gaze and the pose. My process explores the relationship between the performativity of our identity and the need to be accepted. I am still trying to understand what happens during the process of reflection while drawing a portrait that a selfie simply cannot satisfy. Drawing a portrait from a digital image gives me a more objective stance through more prolonged deliberation. By this process, I want to form a clearer understanding of what happens to a ‘performed’ digital image which is translated into the context of a traditional pencil portrait.