Martin Steingesser
2007 Biennial Talk
Run Time: 4:31
Change. When haven’t I known it? Since before birth, that’s what the rule has been. “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world,” as Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself. I catch a look at myself in the mirror and am surprised, the wonder being not how my appearance has changed since last I looked but that I continue to be unprepared for the phenomenon. I may wince, or smile, depending on where in our cultural iconography my image in that moment happens to fall. But surprise—why?
Everything is change and mystery; everything, from abacus to zygote, and certainly this phenomenon of how I continually evolve. My self-portrait is an exploration of the mystery, the act of painting itself driven by it. Painting also is a way of entering and consciously, aesthetically participating in how I appear. It satisfies the wish—the need to arrest just a moment of the mystery.
What I enjoy and is most meaningful in things I make is the result of intuitive participation with sources I don’t understand. With my self-portrait, this is true from the choice of the wooden stool seat it’s painted on, a gift of the place and moment painting began, to its title, which has become the gift of this short writing about it.
And what do I find that I can’t see in a mirror? People keep telling me our blood is blue until exposed to air outside the body. Call this Self-portrait in Blue.