Silhouette Portrait - Nicole Ehlert

The silhouette/self-portrait that I created artfully represents an overall picture of the emotions I experience on a daily basis. Using a spectrum of red-purple-blue to fill the figure of my face represents the notion that my emotional experiences change very often throughout the day depending on what I am engaging in. The purple represents me at my baseline, depicting my deep, empathetic, and somewhat mysterious nature as well as my love for beauty and vibrancy. It is a midpoint between my extreme states of stress (red) and calmness/carefree attitude (blue). I chose saturated, darker versions of these three colors to represent the fact that I tend to feel emotions very strongly but also that I tend to obscure them from the outside world. These three colors were interlinked using small pieces of amorphous magazine scraps. Using amorphous shapes in my figure is significant in that this spectrum of emotion that I feel each day changes and morphs very quickly, seamlessly, and unpredictably. Therefore, I wanted these colors to intermix haphazardly. In contrast, the ground of my silhouette is constructed of geometric, straight lines of varying thickness. These lines represent my interpretation of the outside world as being more straightforward and mapped out than my internal, emotional world. The lines represent the passing of time, with the different colors of yellow, orange, and red representing the exciting opportunities that the outside world presents me with (yellow/orange) as well as the challenges that I face (red). I wanted to use red in both the figure and ground so as to show the fluid impact of the outside world on me internally.

The abstract elements of color and shape are utilized within this collage to represent a portrait of me as a person. During this process I learned a lot about how I view the blurred lines between myself internally and the outside world. I thought a lot about how my range of emotions are impacted by the outside world as well as what my characteristic emotions (empathy, deepness of thought) are. I was not surprised by any of this, but did find myself paying more attention to these emotional processes during day-to-day life. It is very interesting how color and shape can influence the ways in which you feel and experience things.