Self Portrait #3, Elaine de Kooning, by Cristie Newhart

Self Portrait #3, by Elaine de Kooning (USA) 1946. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Self Portrait #3 Elaine de Kooning  American 1946

I’ve often wondered about self-portraits and how artists depict themselves and the images that surround them.  

This portrait says so much by showing so little.
And you look like you have a secret, or some hidden knowledge foreign to the rest of us.

Is this room real?  Real, like you use the room and the items placed are not just props?
Art is like life, we can't always tell what's a prop.

Maybe you sketch here, maybe you don't.  But that chair doesn't seem steady or comfortable.
The oversized cushion wants to spill off of it.  It looks like a chair that lives in a corner, unobtrusive.
You pulled it to the center, placed a cushion on it that was meant for something else and called it a seat.
And it has no back. Was that the style of the era?

And there's no place to put your sketchbook or your coffee cup, like a table.  I see a square one,
with skinny wooden legs.  Without a table, wouldn't you knock that cup with your foot? I would,
and all the coffee would spill out over the edges, over that nice shiny floor.

And isn't shiny!  How do you have time to buff a floor?  I guess you would do it if it was important to you,
but still there has to be dullness somewhere in a well used floor.

The wall hangings are meaningful to you, I would imagine.  Something from your past,
something that holds memory, Something you would like people to surmise about you 
but not really know.  The fabric tapestry, my guess, you picked it up in a 2nd hand store in Brooklyn.
You keep it simply because you like it.

And you...stylish.  Your oversized sweater and flowing trousers show how slender you are.  That's for real,
I've seen your picture.  The sweater is what gives the room its warmth.

And the feather-did it drop from a stuffed owl and no one ever thought to pick it up, or maybe
it was placed there purposefully, by you, as a reminder of how fleeting things are, how the wind can 
take you anywhere.

Cristie Newhart

Cristie Newhart is a writer and yoga teacher and  has been a faculty member at Kripalu Center for Yoga for over 20 years. She exudes equal parts warmth and wisdom as she makes some of yoga’s deeper philosophical aspects engaging and accessible to modern-day practitioners.  She is a deep lover of poetry, art, nature and all forms of expression.  Cristie lives in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.
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