I’m coming to the end of my sixteenth consecutive school year. I’ve spent the most formative part of my life just being shuttled back and forth between home and school instead of learning how to be a person. I decided to trace this circuit as the basis for my self portrait. The route to grades 1-4 was a straight line, and as time went on, the routes got longer and more twisted.
I thought it would be interesting to apply the initial direction of each of the four lines to a sort of analog clock model, with one 360-degree rotation equating to 16 years (it was originally 12 years, before I decided to include college, which explains the three lines drawn below).
My house is at the center of the clock, and the four routes are the arms. The resulting figure would be a cross (which hopefully would not come out looking too much like a technicolor swastika), and I would build the landscape of my self-world around that cross. As time went on, the routes to school got longer and more twisted. Another thing that changed gradually over time: my general disposition. As I grew older I gradually became the most pessimistic bastard alive, to levels unheard of. I’ve struggled with this in a big way.
I got a kick out of the idea that I’d somehow outgrown my father’s happy-go-lucky tropical genes and became colder and more Irish, so I attempted to convey this by splitting my environment into a tropical south and an icy, temperate north. Whatever direction the longer routes pointed in would be the new north, and the shorter lines would delineate the new south. Once the lines were mapped out, I warped them to suggest some kind of variance in elevations, and I and drew the landscape around their exaggerated endpoints. To introduce some humanity to my strange landmass, I stole a pair of eyes from a picture of some British TV host and turned them into southern wetlands. To give it a sense of place, I set the whole thing against the most impossible of settings — deep space — suggesting that these sixteen years have left me feeling quite lost, and without much point of reference.
