'Here's Looking at You'

'Here's Looking at You' is the title of the fourth chapter of Richard Brilliant's book Portraiture, and in that chapter he discusses self-portraiture across all mediums of art. So although not overtly relevant to my specific angle of research, it is still a very useful core text for this field.

There are numerous points of note throughout the chapter, below are those which stood out as greatly significant to me:

• Brilliant mentions the mirrors input to self-portraiture - 'The fallacy of the reflection, our own internal images of self are misleading compared to how other see us. Seeing your reflection unexpectedly and being surprised by the image is testimony to the varying imagined perspectives you hold of your appearance/presentation. 
• He also cites philosopher David Hume's musings on the notion of 'self': "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call 'myself', I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch 'myself' at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception ... If anyone , upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of  'himself', I must confess that I can reason no longer with him."
• Parmigianino's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Where the viewer is privy to the moment of an artist meeting his own reflection. 'Parmigianino represents himself as a subject experiencing his own (re)presentation in a mirror.'
• "With greater or lesser degrees of success, self portraiture always makes a concentrated autobiographical statement - the manifesto of an artists introspection" (Brilliant)
• Norman Rockwell's Triple Self-Portrait. ".. it is so explicitly self-referential and demonstrates so well the distortions in the mirror reflection. .. one could hardly imagine a more explicit statement of the 'I' in the work, and of the artists engagement with the concept of 'I-ness'." (Brilliant)
• Brilliant also mentions something that I would term as 'the vulnerability of sharing introspection' which is a threat to all self-portraying artists: "The natural impulse to protect one's personal privacy from others conflicts with that artists equally natural desire to create an autobiographical image that, being a separate entity, lives outside of himself and may escape his control."

Parmigianino - Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Norman Rockwell - Triple Self-Portrait

Update: Although initially conducted for my research module, I could conclude that this reading will in fact have a more direct use to the major practical project which is to commence soon. The works of Rockwell, Parmigianino, Lovis Corinth, Artemisia Gentileschi and others mentioned in the chapter (and furthermore Brilliant's commentary on them) have sparked lots of ideas for self-portraiture work, particularly in relation to the mirror/reflection - see here.