We all want to be seen. We all hide. {Fine Art Portraiture - Vancouver WA}
You’ve all likely seen it or will soon, an image of someone on your FB feed who seems familiar. Then you realize who it is. The image doesn’t quite look entirely like the person you know, at least not who you see in person at the grocery store, or in passing at the gym or school PTA meeting.
What you’re seeing is something different. A new and different way of seeing someone you know. And you’re intrigued and drawn in. You want to see the rest of the images likely as much as the person sharing wants you to see them.
But what really is so special about this app and what it does with ai? Is it really so much different than all the other apps that circulate in and out and around FB? An argument could be made that it’s just another version of a watercolor art app which converts regular images into something special and magical. No matter what your viewpoint, I’m reminded of what I’m convinced of:
We want to see ourselves in ways we don’t normally see ourselves.
This has been much of my experience on my own self-portrait journey since 2015. What self-portrait work has unlocked for me is something akin to words of Luca Fogale in his song Half-Saved, “it’s in a form I can’t explain.”
“To be half-loved or half-saved still means something. But it’s in a form I can’t explain. To have half-gone or half-stayed. Maybe I’ve never really found or really lost my way.”
In this life where we’re just in the middle. Our everyday. As mundane as it can be, it’s a struggle to feel truly alive in a way that allows us to really experience the now instead of waiting until we look back and it’s already past.
There are so many parts of each of us. The things that make us feel alive. It’s hard to adequately express those things on FB and to our friends, sometimes even to those closest to us. Again, “it’s in a form I can’t explain.”
And I believe this, what the lensa app is tapping into for people, is the same thing my self-portrait work does for me, and the Fine Art Portrait work I do for clients. It’s a way to see ourselves in ways we don’t normally get to see, in a way which we feel expresses something about ourselves that we want others to see.
But not only that, it’s the discovering process as the images are presented to us, some we hate, some we love, others we’re intrigued enough by that we want to keep it even though it’s not perfect and we’re not sure we love it. But we ponder them. And then we share them with others because they are revealing something about how we see ourselves.
It’s not always a smiling face. But it’s something; “in a form I can’t explain.”
