The art that interests me serves a purpose beyond simply being decorative and pleasing to the eye and emotions. There are behavioral scientists and evolutionary biologists who believe art has no other reason to exist than to stimulate the pleasure center in our brains and make us happy. They contend that unlike those human abilities, traits, and urges that evolved as survival mechanisms, art is non-essential other than to make existence a little less brutal (as if that in itself weren’t reason for it to have an important place in our lives). A colorful shower curtain can give us a little jolt of joy, but I ask more from a work of art; I want to feel, even if only instinctively, that the artist has communicated something personal and compelling. A painting of flowers may be pretty, but it’s less meaningful than a bunch of actual flowers if the artist hasn’t shared a genuine response to the flowers. What is it about those particular flowers, at that moment in the artist’s life, that compels the artist to memorialize them? A pretty landscape has no more significance than a decorative dinner plate if the artist had no other intention than to produce a pretty landscape. If we’re to honor the evolutionary purpose of art in human existence, then we must demand it communicate something about the artists’ unique and immediate experience of this life.

I'd always thought of the self-portrait as being someone other than me, as if the subject were a character in a drama. The process of painting myself is not one of flattery, as with most commissioned portraits, but rather of discovery, and I like the idea of stepping outside myself to observe myself. Recently, however, I learned of the late photographer Minor White (1908-1976), whose subjects covered a wide range including portraits, but who specialized in photographing objects in tight close-up so that they appeared abstract. White once declared that every photograph he made, no matter the subject matter, was a self-portrait. By this he meant that the act of creating a work of art is an act of revealing oneself. I've been forced to reassess by ideas about the self-portrait.