Self Portrait Four Magical Realism

My creature is a grouper. It is a type of fish that has my eyes, lips, and arms. The fish has human characteristics which makes it unique to other species of fish. The grouper has my eyes so I can see what a fish sees under water. The fish also has my arms so it can pick up things with its hands and move more freely with human arms rather than fins. This special grouper is still able to swim like a normal fish because it still has its fins and tail. I choose to become a fish because I love to be in the water. I love snorkeling and seeing the world that is under the sea and not visible to humans on land. I think the ocean is beautiful and has so many undiscovered things in it that really interest me.

I choose to put the fish in a little bit of a different atmosphere than it is used to. The fish is in the water, but the fish is also in the city. My favorite place to vacation is the beach. I enjoy going in the water and seeing the exotic fish and creatures that live there. I am also going to be working in a city when I graduate college. I will be working in Philadelphia when I start my full time job so the city is going to be a very big part of my life in a couple of months. If I could be a real fish I think it would be neat to live in the water like regular fish do, but also in a city. The habitat that I created reminds me of a lost underwater city from a movie like “Pirates” or “The Little Mermaid.”

Like I said before, the beach and the city are going to play a big part in my life. I hope to spend my vacation time at various beaches throughout the world and the rest of my time in the city. My fish represents an ideal world where I have both my working life and leisure time in one. The habitat that my fish is living in plays a big part of the environment I will be living in very soon.

Magical realism allowed me to create an animal that represents me in an ideal habitat. I was able to put two different worlds together in one and live sufficiently in both worlds by becoming a fish.

Frida’s “Wounded Deer” painting inspired my project because she used an animal and put it in a unique environment. In Frida’s painting her head is placed on the body of a deer in a very mysterious looking wooded environment. In her picture as well as mine you have the view of water and land. On the top of my self-portrait is a city and in the middle and bottom is water. Frida has her painting opposite of mine with water in the distance and land upfront where the animal is standing. The background of her painting has a magical feeling to it that makes you think the deer is somewhere out of a storybook. I tired to utilize this technique by creating an atmosphere that was rare and not of the ordinary. My background looks like something out of a Disney movie. The background is very colorful and busy.

I tried to pick parts of my body that could be placed on the fish to give it a feminine look while not using parts that men and women differ in. To the untrained eye it is very difficult to tell if a fish is male or female. In order to identify more with the fish and make it more like me I wanted to give it a feminine touch. I put my eyes on the fish that are done up with mascara so it is obvious that they are the eyes of a woman. The second body part of mine that is on the fish is my smile. Smiling is a facial expression that is associated with women. Women are often supposed to appear always happy and content while men are to remain expressionless. I wanted to put a smile on my fish not only to apply a gender to the grouper, but show that the environment that it is in is ideal for me. An arm is very hard to express gender with so I used a picture where I have a bracelet on and my finger nails painted to help make the fish more feminine. I specifically picked certain body parts to place on my fish to express my gender on an animal that normally is not identified by its gender. I had a lot of fun cutting and pasting trying to add texture and think about gender while creating a self-portrait of me on the body of a fish.