Study for Self Portrait - Don't Be Afraid of the Shape of Things to Come

Ohio-based painter Emerson Burkhart was a prolific self-portraitist, painting at least three dozen works in which he casts himself in a variety of roles and captures many moods. In this study for an oil painting he holds up a stencil with a cut-out the exact shape of the finished painting—not a square or rectangle but an irregular half circle. Burkhart thought deeply about the nature of representation and reality and may be playing with the notion that every image is a slice of the real world.