Self Portrait: Weather (Vaguely after Dürer)

Erin Currier's reflections on her self portrait:

Albrecht Durer’s Self Portrait is significant in that it is at the vanguard of a movement that stepped beyond the dark night of the Gothic past and into the bright of day of the Renaissance. At this critical juncture between the medieval and the modern, Durer painted himself as the model of the human being, the artist, and nearness to God and, in the process, transformed his very image into that of Jesus Christ. The austere strength of the portrait, which somehow manages to transmit equal parts confidence and humility, appealed to me, as does its appearance of being both terrestrial and celestial—an attribute that, in my mind, is shared with the works of my favorite artists of a much later era in Mexico: the Magical Realism-of-sorts of Remedios Varo, Frida Kahlo, Lola and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and Diego Rivera). 

Thus, half a millennium later, I decided to quote an auburn-haired, green-eyed artist referencing Jesus with a portrait of auburn-haired, green-eyed me referencing Mother Nature, Gaia herself, in a simple self portrait. In it I have attempted to express something of the supernatural that has been my direct experience of late. Just as one is never prepared for the death of one’s beloved, one likewise is not expecting the magic that ensues: all of the signs that manifest in the natural world. Anthony, my love, used to point to the wind that moved the leaves on the trees and the glorious light that moved upon them and say, “Look, Erin, that is how you know that God exists.”  Whether or not one believes in God, in the Divine, in Gaia, the natural world is unassailable in its majesty and miraculousness with its comets streaking across violet skies, its bolts of lightning flashing beneath double rainbows, its birds and fireflies, the gypsy-flamenco-like nightly laments of its coyotes, its red suns and golden moons and hatchings of riverflies, its golden eagles, its mother and baby whales—provided one’s heart and eyes are open to it all. Self Portrait: Weather (vaguely after Durer) depicts one life as representative of seven billion, replete with the pain, longing, passion, magic, and love that a single life can hold—its “weather.”