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Art or Theater? Figuring out how to make autobiographical artwork

Stephanie Eche

Learning to self soothe, 10 x 8 x 1.5”, Wax pastel, brush pen, and fiber paste on wood panel 2024

Last year I made a series of paintings about my matrescence (the complicated emotional and physical process of becoming a mother) called Postpartum Paintings. This work was very autobiographical, raw, and made up of what I would call experiments in acrylic painting and ceramics. I was figuring out how to make art out of and during a very difficult personal experience. After -- and while -- I was making the work I did a lot of research, see my Suggested Reading List: Postpartum Paintings, and looked at other artwork about motherhood, along with watching numerous tv shows and movies, having lots of conversations with other moms, and birthing and raising a baby. My baby is now two years old. 

There is so much visual art about the process of becoming a mother and the experience of being a mother, and yet there’s really not enough. In addition to seeing artwork that is extremely relatable, I also see a lot with bodies that do not look like mine and/or experiences that do not exactly resonate with my own. Every time I question the need to record my own experience, I think about all the mestiza women in history who were not able to do so. I also feel the need to record via drawing and writing because that is how I remember and treasure this unique time. And so I keep going. 

Lately I’ve been thinking about how exactly I want to record my experiences in visual art, and I guess also writing, both of which are often experienced online, like this blog post. 

If I had to pinpoint where I think I want my artwork to be, I think it is like this:

(These are scales I just made up to help orient myself)

Reality < —--------X---------------------- > Fiction

What I experience versus what I tell myself I experience(d)

Experience < —--------------------X-------- > Memories

What I experience versus what I remember experiencing 

Realism < —-------------------X--------- > Abstraction

What I literally see versus what I feel I see/experience

Truth < —-----------X----------------- > Lies

What is true versus what is not true. This is complicated and I’m not sure if this scale is helpful.

Documentation < —------------------X---------------- > Fantasy

Recording what is versus making things up.

Figurative < —----------------------X------------ >  Abstract

Depicting figures versus depicting abstract imagery.

This thinking has led me to mythology. 

Contemporary Myth: a story rooted in experience that I think is worthy of passing down visually, orally, or digitally. Attempts to make sense of the unexplainable. Closer to fiction than fact. Refers to one’s personal, cultural, economic, and religious context. (my definition)

I have noticed that a lot of contemporary artwork references myths (Ivan Forde, Hilary Doyle, Anna Ortiz, Isolina Minjeong, perhaps Rose Simpson to name a few). This is common in art history, but I do think it is interesting how contemporary artists are not just referencing myth as it has been recorded, but are expanding or changing what the myth actually is or could have been, like recontextualizing a classical myth or bringing attention to a mythology that may have been overlooked or undervalued by Western European art. I also see it in contemporary religious and cultural practices, like in Judaism Unbound episode 422: Purim 2024 0 Miriam, Dan, and Lex, which reconsiders the book of Esther and how to celebrate Purim, especially related to violence against a race and, I’m assuming, taking into account the genocide currently happening in Gaza. 

However, I’ve also been very interested in artwork that is itself mythical due to both the circumstances around the making and the actual imagery in the work. Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?) is breathtaking and exemplifies this for me. She created about 1300 colorful, autobiographical (?), and surreal paintings in the span of two years before she, a 26-six-year old pregnant Jewish woman, was arrested by Nazis and killed at Auschwitz in 1943. More recent discoveries (see The Obsessive Art and Great Confession of Charlotte Salomon by Toni Bentley in The New Yorker) expand and complicate the mythology that already exists around her and her work. I really enjoyed this talk by Monica Bohm-Duchen via The Fritz Ascher Society: Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943): Life Before Auschwitz, 6/1/2020). Salomon’s work gives me courage to create despite whatever the obstacles may be, or my own critical feelings about my work. 

Frida Kahlo is also in this territory, I would say. See Recalling Frida Kahlo, myth and reality by  Elisabeth Malkin in the New York Times. 

Bending Reality

Then there’s this area that I can’t quite pin down that isn’t really referencing myth and isn’t really creating its own myth but in trying to record reality, a specific personal or made up experience or combination of experiences, it starts to actually bend reality. You might start to question what is the real experience of the creator and what is made up, possibly for the viewer’s experience specifically. 

I will put in this arena: 

This is what I’ve been thinking about lately.

How do you think about autobiographical artwork?