Self - Portait paintings - out of the research

In the year 2009 I have completed the research for my doctoral thesis, on which I worked for six years. The research is interdisciplinary, and touches the areas of art, psychology, and philosophy. The origin point and the main support of the research is art as a genre of self-portrait drawing.

The research deals with the investigation of the psychological self and touches upon the diagnostic-investigatory approach called ‘self-study research’. For the purposes of the research I have committed to paint self-portraits for several years. This is an area with which I occupied myself considerably as an artist, and thus it was deemed reliable, right and suitable for research work.

I used the self-study research in a case study, while using several approaches from the qualitative research paradigm. I have removed the painting – for the sake of this instance, the genre – from the field of the autonomous art, and chose to relate to the phenomenon and the image that is produced from it as a kind of human behavior. Thus the painting became a visual image, for the purposes of an ethnographic investigation. In this it echoes with the research issue called Autoethnography.

For the purposes of research I spent two years drawing self-portraits in front of a mirror, and focused upon facial drawing. In the language of research, this activity is defined as conducting field research and gathering data. After completing the fieldwork stage, defined in my research as artistic activity, I defined the paintings for the sake of research as ‘visual interpreting texts’. This is the stage, in which I advanced from the investigation of the self to the investigation of texts, and developed a unique methodology for interpretation and analysis. With this I also defined it as Art- based hermeneutic research. 

The portraits made for the sake of research do not attempt and, in fact, do not aspire, to be copies of reality, as much as I did not intend to paint a photograph. The reality which I examined in front of the mirror was for me a starting point to inspiration and a special space for an intra-subjective dialogue. The language of art and the artistic activity were the mediators in a special, intimate journey and the paintings created became texts requiring analysis and interpretation.

The series of portraits, the objects, the stand-ins, the exhibition and the products accumulated throughout the research are not only a visual archive of a personal story but also they can also be seen as a kind of personal experience that uses a known and familiar art genre. It is based upon psychological and philosophical approaches in order to examine processes of human behavior and point a unique ways to learn about the human being and society, as well as research options. (See chapters from the thesis in the sub-category ‘Chapters and Excerpts from the Doctoral Thesis’).
My doctoral paper is only the beginning of the road of research, and it constitutes a basis for continuing research in which I am engaged today.

Today, I teach this branch, the research methods, and present various options of using the self-portrait as a platform for creating, research, development (see the Self-portrait workshop category). I keep researching the area, delving in-depth into the painting of self-portraits, and publish articles accordingly in various platforms including professional journals. The list of my articles and their abstracts is available in a subcategory to this category.
(see the gallery category for the series of self-portraits)

The thesis in the Ben Gurion University librery - Clicl here