self-portrait

Authors Talk: Paula Izydorek

Superstition Review

We listed the wrong URL for Sunny Nestler in our newsletter. Please view her author’s talk here.

 

Today we are pleased to feature artist Paula Izydorek as our Authors Talk series contributor. In this short video, Paula discusses five paintings from her series titled (Self) Worth, as well as her overall artistic proclivities.

Paula declares that one thing she truly enjoys about (Self) Worth is that “the image itself repeats, but the composition changes based on the wood grain,” or the materials of production. While each painting is a self-portrait, they are not exclusively portraits of Paula alone; as she states, “I like to have the viewer put themselves in the place of the face that’s in the abstract composition, and to review your own self-worth.” That way, she emphasizes, viewers can identify with the story being expressed, and “connect with the image based on their own personal experience.”

As she concludes, Paula expresses her desire that each viewer will be able to “identify with the energy around the subject, rather than get lost in the subject as a portrait.” That way, she stresses, viewers will be able to use the work as a gauge to “evaluate…where you want to be with regards to your self worth.”

You can view five paintings from Paula’s (Self) Worth series in Issue 21 of Superstition Review.

Guest Blog Post, Maureen Alsop: Requiescat, Self-Portrayal at Samhai

Maureen Alsop

Requiescat, Self-Portrayal at Samhain: Spiritisim is Annunciation, You Thought You Were An Opera Singer

You are engaging a meditation on your death. Perhaps you broke the law, but it was an old law, a lost aria, unenforced. You are held in the residue and ascetic disaffiliation. Sleep’s epitaph, your eyes guarded by sixpence, silvered shine of wolfhounds. At the feast, they set a place for you among the dead. Cold stars languish under your crane-skin dress. Hornet’s nest kept in your hair’s gust.  Inexplicable speech. Moth light over gray meadow. You taste the hum in the walls where mule stood over the glass riverbank.  Sparrow stasis. For each animal there is a trade. There is a wormhole upon the forehead, bonfire constellations, maggot conscience. You’d been walked between bonfire’s remains, the dappled throng. Through the small barn window you saw the blistered flank of the fur-licked cattle.

Belief in the body is attempted, form found without words, form given. Leaving the mind starts out as a little joke. Here, Spiritism is a woman riding a colt; the space toward which she is moving is an immeasurable dark. How did you think things would improve? She gives night the permission to erase the host. Your architectures had always been enough, and perfectly therein.