Mobile Photography & Art – Portrait of an Artist – Seeing Through The Eyes of Maria Cecilia de São Thiago

It means seeing in a different way wherever I am. I charge daily, even in routine activities, even on the most boring days, to get a new look at something monotonous.

Creativity is the motion we all have inside.

Creativity is putting out what lives have hidden inside.

Yeah, I know exactly when it happened.

In my first Art class in Kindergarten. My teacher, a great friend to this day, who was fundamental and decisive for my formation, gave an exercise for the whole class with paper, string, and gouache. The result left me so overwhelmed that instead of doing just one or two, I ended up this day taking home a pile of artwork. I made a lot more at home and I never failed to marvel at the results.

My work attempts to show how photography extends beyond its own physical and subjective limits and often tells a whole story about the effects of human interaction.

Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure up the realms of our imagination. I create through processes of imagination and visualisation what can be seen explicitly as a ritual to perceive intuitively what is hidden.

My images, sometimes dreamy, or simply pictorial are made with the iPhone and elaborated through applications for iPad as a Digital Collage.

My art reflects the world because my concerns are for the ills of the human being as a whole, almost as characters, portray the contradictions, inconsistencies of our society, and the anxieties of our time, and incorporate the most dynamic elements of our daily life.

I see selfies as self-portraits made by so many artists throughout their careers, where it was common painters like Caravaggio, Albert Durer, Gustav Courbet, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Picasso, Klee, Matisse, to name a few.

The self-portrait, for me, represents what one imagines, desires or idealizes to be. It consists of a speech made in the first person, that is, of a visual autobiography, and reveals a self-directed, reflective look.

If this type of work is a further exploration of the soul of the artist or if this simply serves as a model, the artist is undoubtedly the cheapest and available model to use.

The reason I make self-portraits is definitely that I can do whatever I want with my face. I can deconstruct it, I can cut, cut, scratch, knead, sew, and I will not need to explain why I see that face at that moment, like that.

But whatever the reason for others, almost all artists, from painters to sculptors, have tried this exploration of their own.

The mechanism through which we present ourselves to others is an effort not to gain their approval, but more to understand ourselves and understand the world we live in.

Self portraiture is for me the best way to know myself. A natural way of self-awareness, acceptance, and inner evolution as a person.

If selfies are a new form of identity work,  a concept to explain the strategies individuals use to transform personal identity avowals into social identity imputations, I can not see why not work with our own image.

In other words, we each have a sense of who we are and who we want to be (personal identity) and through our actions, we hope to have this particular self-conception reflected.

Within this view, self-portraits or selfies are not just a reference to “pathological narcissism“ (Hall, 2014, p. 276 – Hall J. (2014). The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History. London, UK: Thames & Hudson.), instead they transport the essence of the inner states of a person.

My last research about self-portraiture is a series of blended images of William Adolphe Bouguereau, with Albrecht Durer’s “Self-Portrait at 28” from the year 1500, and myself.

I would say that I am proud of everyone I have ever done, or even proud of the next one I have not yet created.

I have a great collection of paintings and Photos, I’ve done all my life.

In fact, not only paintings but photographs, watercolours, porcelain painting, wood engraving, stone engraving, metal, wood carvings and even silver jewellery of authorship, that is, made on the workbench.

As I am very attached to my things after the first painting was exposed and sold, it was important to think about the next project soon and dedicate myself to it, so I do not get too attached to what was not mine anymore.

There are no rules in art, but in a simple way I would say I trust my instinct.

Luckily, time and experience make it easier to recognise this feeling. I always remember a teacher who said:- “Remember you’re the artist and ultimately the work is done when you say so”.

In the case of iPhoneography, what I can say is that I have several methods of creation and I have practically a method to achieve the result that I wish, in mind.

so before starting to edit a photo, I already know how it will stay and so I work from one application to another until I get what I want.

But It must be said that many times to reach a final result, I save the same image about 30 or 50 times until I get what I imagined.

On the other hand, a work of art is never closed, I can start over again and the results depending on my mood will be completely others. An example is the reinterpretation of Monalisa, I always do.

If you mean technically, I always start with snapseed, to arrange de contrast and color, then I go to ArtStudio and to Superimpose.

But if you mean creation and inspiration, photography and art for me don’t follow any routine. Instead of that, I am always searching to break the fixed rules.

Everything, from music and films until hearing outside conversations in the bank queue. Things I will learn about myself that I didn’t know yet.

I place myself as an actor who relies on what he sees in his daily life to create new characters.

iPhone Lenses, and iPad pen.

Photo Edit Apps:

Snapseed

Superimpose

ArtStudio

iColorama

MetaBrush

Procreate

All Adobe

Hipstamatic

Canva