It’s been years since I’ve worked on the figure. The last time I considered the human body as an artistic direction, I was 22 years old, in college, and living 3000 miles away. Five years, hundreds of small, architectural marker drawings, and a complete change of geography later, I have returned to it once again.
These six pieces have come together due to a series of photographs I took of my beautiful sister last summer. The photos were taken all in the span of time it took for her to smoke one cigarette. It was amazingly intriguing – to see her facial expression and mannerisms change so drastically in such a short period of time. It was a character study really – being the voyeur, watching her mood shift, her thoughts moving and changing with her physical body. It intimately inspired me.
I realized through this body of work that I had been pushing away the figure. I’ve spent years of my life here in Portland looking outward, at my surroundings. As amazingly gorgeous as nature and architecture can be, painting the figure forces us inward. It makes us see ourselves as individuals as well as a single body lurking our way through the whole of humanity.
Portraying the physicality of the human figure can be overwhelming at times. It is an entirely visceral experience, urging us to consider our own mortality, our own flesh and skeleton. It can be an extremely difficult, yet necessary, process.
It took me over five years to artistically return to the human figure, to possess enough self-confidence as an artist to do it justice - to do my own self-image justice. To quote the artist Marisol, “Everything the artist makes is always a kind of self-portrait.” Although inspired by photographs of my sister, these pieces are, of course, a reflection of myself.
-Michelle Ramin, 2009
