The self portraits of Helene Schjerfbeck

Self portrait • Helene Schjerfbeck, 1884-85

Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck's self portraits show clearly the evolution of her style from one that was highly realistic to one that simplified and abstracted the forms of her subject.

Schjerfbeck's life and career was shaped to a large extent by her health. Breaking her hip when she was four, she was left with a difficult limp that made getting around difficult, and kept her home from school. The Independent of London described her work by saying," Imagine the life of Frida Kahlo yoked to the eye of Edvard Munch...." She used her time to sketch, and became a prodigy, accepted into the Finnish Art Society as a drawing student at the age of eleven (most entrants were sixteen).

The support, after her father died two years later, of her mother and a teacher, who recognized her gifts, allowed her to continue to study. By the late 1870s her reputation was growing in Finland. A travel grant and her own determination and continuing marketing allowed her to travel to Paris, and to other places in Europe, including Florence, Prague, and England.

Self portrait • Helene Schjerfbeck, 1912

In 1890, because of worsening health and finances, Schjerfbeck needed to move back to Finland, where she continued to paint. Her paintings were "rediscovered" in 1917, when she had her first solo exhibition. She continued to explore and grow as a painter, and her work had changed considerably during that time.

Self portrait • Helene Schjerfbeck, 1915

In 1921, she wrote to a friend, "Now that I so seldom have the strength to paint, I have started on a self-portrait. This way the model is always available, although it isn't at all pleasant to see oneself." She continued to paint self portraits – at least 36 during her life.

Self portrait • Helene Schjerfbeck, 1939

Schjerfbeck painted most of her self portraits from 1939 to 1945. Painted with a brutal honesty, and perhaps reflecting the fear and panic of the breakout of war with Russia, during which she had to be evacuated, Self Portrait with Black Mouth, painted with both brush and palette knife, is one of those.

You can find an excellent review of her work by Marjan Sterckx at Helene Schjerfbeck: Finland's best-kept secret.

Painting self portraits

Em (behind easel) and Judy (in front) paint, while Betty packs up to go.

Here are photos of some of the folks in the Wednesday class – most painting self portraits, all but one of them for the first time.

Cindi paints her first self portrait.

Dan, Jamie, and Diane paint, with collage pieces by high school students on the wall behind them.

Diane, an experienced painter, paints her second self portrait.

Trish works on a painting of a rose.

Em paints her first self portrait.

They did a great job! (Thanks to Dan for lending me his phone for the photos!)

Self portrait demonstrations

A week ago, I demonstrated painting self portraits in the Wednesday and Friday classes. In the Wednesday class, I was asked to paint myself smiling – a difficult thing, since concentrating on the work at hand draws one's face into a serious, often stern expression.

Karen Lynn Ingalls self portrait in progress ( photo courtesy of Christina)

The Friday self-portrait I spent less time on. It has a longer way to go until it is completed, but you can clearly see how I found my composition and blocked in the big shapes with color. I'm just beginning to define those shapes a little further on the planes of the face. For each of these, I used only a primaries palette – yellow, red, and blue – with white.

Class painting demonstration — self portraits

Karen Lynn Ingalls painting self portrait

The class asked for a self portrait painting demonstration on Wednesday. Here's a photo Michael took of the process (thank you, Michael!). When we talked about why people generally look so stern in their self portraits — they're concentrating — I said I would do this of me smiling. It's tough to concentrate, smile, and talk about the painting process — all while painting!

In addition to the challenges presented by the process of painting portraits, we talked about the question of whether people wanted to memorialize their aging processes. As my friend and acupuncturist Rebecca Weinfeld says, we all have the vanity gene.

But painting is not photography. Painting does not require the documentation of every detail of every last wrinkle, unless you really want to paint in a documentary, photorealist method. It's your painting, you make the rules. Look at shapes and values and colors – don't get sidetracked by the details. As always, use what you see as a springboard to greater creativity.

(Or — if you want to approach it this way — as Trish said, painting is better than botox.)