Self-Inquiry Portraits

In this exercise, two self-inquiry portraits are created: one that portrays your experience with the destructive aspects of the four modes of functioning, and one that portrays your experience (or desired experience) with the constructive aspects.

Consider your relationship to thinking, feeling, acting, sensing regarding a specific creative project or idea. How do you experience these modalities in your approach to your work?

1. Turn to a new two-page spread in your journal. For a larger space, add more paper to each page, if needed. Draw an outline of yourself on the page. Turn your book vertical if your portrait is standing, horizontal if reclining.

2. Add background texture to the pages with random papers from your stash. Try mixing decorative papers with junk mail, wrapping paper, old maps, or pages torn from books or from your own journals.

3. Accepting that 99.99 percent of us are not portrait artists, go ahead and draw, paint, collage a self-portrait of your entire body. If you are a portrait artist, try this using nothing but papers out of your recycling bin and the art supplies available at the drugstore.

4. Once you’ve got an image of yourself on the page, see if you want to bring out any background elements or if you want to add elements to create a setting. Where are you? What are you doing?