For a person, their identity can be shaped by different people in their lives, their environment, or their experiences in life. Most artists use identity in their artwork because it's a way to tell their story about their struggles and experiences for the audience to understand their paintings. Based on this, there are many ways that an artist can tell their story through different perspectives such as personal, cultural, and historical. When it comes to paintings, a person can interpret them in numerous ways whether it is personal, historical, or cultural it depends on the perspective of the viewer. Due to this, a painting can have multiple meanings that tell about the artist's identity based on their experiences.
In the photograph," Joe Reeves", by Philip Lorna Dicorca the picture shows a man standing in front of a mirror looking straight forward at someone. This picture is personal because of the reflection that the man is seeing, he's unhappy about something in his life. For instance, the facial expression on his face shows that he is insecure about himself and his body image.Body image is an important issue for both men and women but most people look at the women's perspective, instead of both.For the artist, he wanted to show on a personal level that men can get insecure and vulnerable the same way women do.
In the painting, "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth a young women is shown crawling to a house trying to reach it no matter what.The women in the painting has polio and she was a neighbor of the artist who suffered from the disease during that time. Also, polio is a muscular disorder that leaves a person paralyzed from the waist down. During the 1940s, polio wasn't known as a sickness because many doctors could not diagnosis it yet because of the lack of medicine. For the artist, he was inspired by his neighbor's spirituality despite her condition because she showed that she still wanted to live her life.
On a cultural perspective, the painting " Rogues' Gallery" by Charles Butchfield has a garden that has dying sunflowers because the artist was always inspired by nature. In the painting, the artist uses watercolors as his medium to illustrate the flowers and the shadows that surround them. The culture of the painting is that the term Rogues's Gallery is usually used as a pictograph that shows people who are suspected of crimes. However, in the painting the artist decides to take a different approach of the concept that existed during New York and other places as well. Based on this, the cultural aspect is used to it's advantage and the artist's vision is expressed in a new way.
Overall, a person's identity can be based on different factors in their life. Through art, artists are able to show their identity through the paintings they do based on their perspective. For an artist, personal, cultural, and historical perspective is important because it allows an artist to tell a story through different angles. Due to this, paintings are used for artists to tell their stories and to give viewers a variety of perspectives from their own experiences.
Andrew Wyeth
"Christina's World"
Tempera on panel
1948
Philip -Lorca Dicorcia
"Joe Reeves; 37 years old; San Fernando, California;"
Chromogenic color print
1990-92
Charles Butchfield
"Rouges'Gallery"
Watercolor and pencil on paper
1916
