Personal Paintings: A Junior Self-Portrait Diptych by Daniel Petti (2013)

In my diptych, I made an attempt to portray the strangely unique but unified relationship between myself and other people. I often look for ways to be different, but I can never help realizing how similar I am to others. Specifically, I like to compare human beings to the paintings you might find in an art museum: Each one is different and unique, some are more beautiful than others, but all of them are really the same paint on the same canvas, and they were all meant to be shown off and admired occasionally. This is why I chose to juxtapose these particular images, the human and the paint colors mingling in water. In a way, the picture on the right is the origin of the one on the left, it shows the raw color that gave rise to the unique me and everyone else today.

The picture on the right is pure color, raw and untamed. This is a metaphor for the raw information from which humanity is wrought. I still find the way food coloring diffuses through a glass of water to be fascinating, in the same way as a dividing cell or a growing embryo. I learned that you can never get the perfect picture of this particular scene, because each one is unique. If you take enough, you’ll always find a new one that is better than the best one you had before. I guess we’re like that too as people. We can never actually be perfect people, but given enough time, we can keep getting better and better.

The picture on the left is sort of a smaller version of me. His tiny body is created from a mishmash of non-matching parts, like Frankenstein's Monster made out of clay. Before him lies sufficient components to build another person, perhaps the tantalizing reminder of the infinite possibilities for what he could have been. He exhibits the same color, but here it has been harnessed into a specific and one-of-a-kind configuration. And yet, some plasticity remains. This human is more of a tapestry than a painting, but he forgets that the clay will never harden unless we bake it ourselves, that he can keep remodeling himself as something new and different for the rest of his life. This is my single favorite aspect of being human, and I think that we forget about it far too easily.