* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Lique Schoot exclusively paints herself. She is making self-portraits for more than 10 years now. As of October 2003, she has been making a picture of herself every day. The paintings act as visual diaries. Some of the images started out digitally and these are used as a basis for her paintings.
The artist tries continuously challenge photography and painting; the strongly lightened self-portraits refer to studied exposures in the studio. While the paintings keep their instantaneous character of the snapshots, this brevity disappears, or perhaps better, is compromised, by the time needed for the painting procedure itself.
Nevertheless, her self-portraits are snapshots (rather than instantaneous scenes) from her daily life, with additional information provided by the backgrounds: Lique Schoot on the sofa, in the bathroom, in the garden, etc. Thus, she exposes herself in different ways, differently dressed, and with varying feelings, moods and emotions. Thus, by the act of the painting her life out, Lique distances herself somewhat from her life and her work rises above the plain self-portrait. Doing this she makes herself purposely vulnerable to the spectator, delivering a “suggestion”, or a “fragment of life”, rather than just a portrait, a graphic novel in which she acts her own life out.
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