Daily Faces, project for my final show as an art major in 2004.

photo taken in 2004: my final show as an undergraduate studio art major at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL 

I’ve thought a lot about why I paint portraits. The simplest answer is just that my body feels drawn to them. I can physically feel it inside my body that I’m excited and filled with a sense of meaning and purpose when I paint or draw a face. But in writing out my life story last year, I also remembered something else. When I was a young adult, there was a strong theme for me of being drawn to certain people. I kept noticing people who stood out to me as being really themselves. There were certain people who just exuded a sense of authenticity, and I think for me, having grown up in a family where a lot was hidden and kept secret and there were a lot of fake smiles, a lot of inauthenticity, and sweeping things under the rug, it was like I became obsessed with people who didn’t seem to be hiding anything. I collected them. I would make lists of their names. I wanted to surround myself with them. I’ve heard Martha Beck say that when we’ve experienced trauma, it’s not safe places we seek most, but safe people. In college, I wanted to take photographs of all these people and put their pictures up in my dorm room. What ended up happening was that I was in a class with a teacher I really loved named E.J. Park. The only assignment in the whole class was that we create something that was transcendent. I ended up taking  photographs of people and using the negatives to create a series of paintings which I then strung up outside. It ended up being my final show as an art major.

I am in awe of people who are free. It is a beautiful thing when humans are fully themselves and it’s not something we find too often in a culture that pressures us, in very real ways, not to be. I think the gravitational pull towards portraiture for me overlaps with my passion for healing and working in mental health. These have been twin themes for me throughout my life.

It’s an ongoing journey to be ourselves and I hope that for every one of you reading this. May you find that courage to quit doing shit you don’t want to do anymore, feel what you really feel, make those tiny shifts towards authenticity in your own life, and say what’s true for you. I’ve been listening to interviews with animal communicator Anna Breytenbach lately. She says, “For most of us humans, it’s life times journey to find out who we really are. And animals, and non-animals, plants as well, they’re just so authentically being who they are. They don’t have the same barriers that we humans have to showing that. They don’t feel shy or self-conscious about it. They just are themselves and they radiate in it, like it or leave it.” May we collectively connect more deeply with nature to learn, once again how to be who we truly are.

Lots of love to you,

Suzanne.

suzannejoyteune.com