Self Portraits

In Released into Language, Wendy Bishop describes a writing activity involving postcards, landscapes, and description. I have used this activity shamelessly in my writing classes with much success—perhaps the success is that the students have fun with the somewhat out of the ordinary writing assignment and fun is often overlooked in writing assignments. When I presented Bishop’s assignment at an Illinois State Writing Project class a couple of years ago, one of the ways discussed to complicate the assignment was to use self-portraits of famous artists instead of post cards of landscapes. Since my Advanced Comp. students are a savvy bunch, I decided to up the ante and try the self-portraits instead of the landscapes.

While I inherited a stash of old postcards, I had to resort to Wikipedia for the self-portraits (it has its uses—and it publishes copyright status of images). I garnered a nice collection and several were similar in appearance soas to make it a little more difficult to identify the portraits (there are ones of Rembrandt and Sir Joshua Reynolds that look particularly similar).

The “vague word” exercise went over well, although a vast majority of students described “beautiful weather” as the sort we are having right now. An “awesome vacation” brought more variety with definite divisions forming between the Las Vegas/Disney World factions, the beach goers, and the campers (two students even discovered they vacation in the same little nook of Door County). Quite a few of them responded with “Oh gross!” to the photo of Frank’s baby bluebirds, which he insisted were “cute,” and this led into my “gross” story. While I cannot print the gross story here (something crucial is lost in the translation from an oral telling to one in text), suffice it to say that once the students realized what “gross” was referring to, there was a large burst of laughter, and I doubt they will ever use the word “gross” again.

The next step was to have them describe the person in the self-portraits I had given them, and print the description (having a printer in the rooms is very useful). Then I called for two volunteers. One read his description while the other drew the person being described on the white board. There was much laughter by both the volunteers and the class during this process (especially over the words “cleavage” and “corset” and the drawer’s reaction to them). In the end, I put the self-portrait of Angelica Kaufmann (the painting being described and reproduced by the volunteers) up on the screen. All things considered, it was a decent reproduction.

The students then turned to their own reproductions; they exchanged descriptions and hit the box of markers. Once done with their drawings, they looked up the original self-portraits in my STV250 folder, and then wrote a note to their classmates as to what details would have made the drawings more successful. Because one of the students already had his description exposed to the class, I substituted a description. The student who got my description chastised me for being vague and saying the person in the portrait was “pretty.” All the students were able to find the right self portrait in the master list, so the descriptions must have been sufficient, and they all seemed like they had a good time (and maybe, just maybe, they will add a bit more description to their essays).