Kiro's Flag Self Portrait Project

 Kirillos Samuel

Art 242: Self I As Image

Professor Doris Cacoilo

Flag Self Portrait Project

    For my Flag Self Portrait project, I wanted to create a piece that showed a little bit of everything that makes me who I am. I decided to make something more abstract and have many colors and waves to it. Two flags are portrayed in this project, my flag which consists of my hobbies and the people that I cannot live without and at the same time I wanted to incorporate the flag that made me who I am, and in the center background there lies the Egyptian flag. The experience is creating something that is cultivating the true meaning of self, and in the words of artist Dahlia Elsayed, “this is my way of marking the experience”. It was very fitting to have my project highlight my Egyptian roots as Dahlia’s father is also Egyptian and her name is a traditional Egyptian name which made it even more so fitting to have these two links in the project. In a work that featured Dahlia Elsayed, we read, “For writers, and for artists in general, a lot of things start with the personal”, said Elsayed…” This is important as this project focuses on me for the portrait portion and people and my hobbies for the parts that are for the personal portion of the project. These images which are included in my flag all make up who I am. Starting off from the far top left corner, my family. They play a vital role in who I am and the mental strength I have learned to acquire comes from them. The picture right under is me while recording. Singing is a major hobby for me and recording and releasing religious music is something that calms me in the worst of times. On the top next to the family picture is a picture of my next hobby, traveling! I have a deadly fear of flying but that has not stopped me from visiting places that I have been dying to visit. Under that one is a picture of me in my home country, Egypt. At the beginning of the semester, I described to the class the feeling of being in the desert in front of the Great Pyramids and it is just a surreal feeling with the sheer size of the pyramids and it makes a person wonder how they were built. The extreme heat with the dry desert was a day I will never forget and that is why I included it in my flag project. Right next to right on the bottom is another picture of that day and it is a selfie with the biggest pyramid of the three, the pyramid of the Pharaoh Khufu. On top of that picture, there is another picture of people that are really close to me and it is a picture of my friends. They are always there in times of trouble and they play an important role in my life. Next to that picture is a picture with the ones that live in my heart and it is with my nieces and my nephew. These little people put a smile on my face like no one else is able to do and without them, there would be no me. The last picture on the bottom right is another hobby of mine, acting. Acting is an escape for me to explore other personalities and make people learn and laugh all in one sitting. The picture is from a play in which I was a man who turned to drugs and lost his life in the end, it was an important role as it showed the effects of drugs and this is one of my favorite hobbies. The project which is inspired by the ideology of Dahlia Elsayed was one that was very fun to create and play with. She was known for creating work that showcased her internal and external experiences and by connecting them together she was able to create beautiful work. In the same sense, I wanted to use my personal experiences through hobbies and people close to me to create this flag project.