Self Portrait. Chicken or Rose?
Self Portrait by Sandra Rinck
When I was a kid, I had a really hard time just saying my name when asked. In elementary school, they used to make all the kids stand up and say their full name and then something that they like. I used to sit in dread and watch everyone before me. I don’t know if I was really listening because I was so focused on how I would say it, “I am Sandra Rinck. I like my teddy bear.”
It was a simple task that all the other kids had no trouble with. Yet in my head it was like I didn’t want to miss my turn. How do I explain it? It was like I had to be right on cue. Don’t hesitate, just get up say your name and something you like, sit down and it will be over. I was riddled with so much anxiety. Pronouncing my name was difficult for me. It’s like saying “wreath”, I hate that word. But like that word, I would pronounce my own name “wink” but it was more like “vwhrnk”.. something like that.
After I had successfully botched my own name, I would rattle off something else. You’d think “I like Buttercup”, was an easy answer that would fulfill the assignment but no…. Instead it would be something like, “I don’t know.” Then the teacher would try to prompt me to say something else and that just made it worse. To this day, I still don’t like it when people ask about myself because I don’t know what to say.
Just like when I was a kid, people expect a simple answer, yet I never seem to look at life as if it is easy, or answers are simple. I can’t fully explain why I say what I say, why I draw what I draw and why I find it so hard to just be “normal”. On the outside I look “normal” but on the inside my brain is a never ending web of all things all the time, all at once and I have to just pick one thing.
Pick one thing, damn it!!!
I can’t! That’s the trouble with my brain.
In this piece I didn’t know what to draw so I picked a flower, a rose, because I liked a previous rose I had drawn. I thought it looked pretty so I copied it. But when I copied it, it didn’t look like a rose anymore, it looked like a chicken. I even thought to myself, “why does that look like a chicken to me?” Without any answers to that question, I just continued on thinking about chickens.
Then I sketched up this whole scene (not seen here) where there were two opposing chickens, one was a fat cat aristocrat and the other an oil field worker. One wore a top hat, the other a ball cap but clearly that is not what this is, is it?
Nope, instead I started thinking about how interesting it is that the foundation of the rose looks messy or unremarkable but with a little bit of refinement it can be so much more. Anyways, I don’t always know how I get from one point to the other, I just start thinking about things, I see things while I am going and then I attempt to draw it or paint it.
As for the octopus, I don’t know why I couldn’t get it out of my head so I put on here because clearly, the octopus just needed an outlet.
What is this piece about?
The art is about being refined, the way we see ourselves, the expectations, the things we do to be presentable. We tell ourselves that we are smarter than that and yet we still become victims to our own mentality. We are always chipping away at ourselves just to be presented and rejected. People talk about how authenticity matters yet, from my own perspective, authenticity is what gets rejected.
No one sees who you are underneath and then you have to wonder about who YOU actually are at your core. Who are you? Do you even know? Are you the blobby mess, a chicken or a rose? Are you a chicken too afraid of your own reflection? Are you happy with who you are but burdened by what others see? It doesn’t really matter how you look at it, the point is that in this world, we are always being processed and refined, and moulded into what someone else wants.
What do you want?