Risa Horowitz

girl before a mirror [revisited] | 2004-2006 | acrylic paint on canvas board

girl before a mirror [revisited] is a teach-myself-how-to-paint project. I taught myself how to paint one self-portrait at a time, using as source imagery the 1585 photographic self-portraits I amassed over a seven-year period, culminating in my Master's thesis work girl before a mirror.

While the work began not-so-much about painting as about the *idea that I could learn to paint, it is practically impossible to avoid falling into the romantic trappings of painterly process - which isn't all that different from the romantic trappings of conceptual art, after all.