"Self- Portrait" – A Study of the 'Self':

The language of the painting is the language of art, a language that serves as traffic signs on a road
map. The painting fixes its messages in its unique language, one that offers signs which allow one to
expose the messages. The signs lie "in the depth of the visible" (Kenaan, 2004: 10). They are the
'artistic means' from which the language of art is composed ― style, genre, image and visual values
(ibid.).
At this point, the role of investigation is to provide an instrument to decipher this ‘map’ and expose ‘the
story of the painting’, the story of the painting’s original self-investigation. Just as the first investigative
process (the artistic activity) used the language of art as its research instrument, the task of this second
investigation will be to fashion the tools to decipher the meanings that this artistic language holds. In
other words, the visual has to be ‘translated’ into the verbal. An intermediate language is needed, a
language that was termed ‘a bridging language'.
2.5.2 Investigation and Creation: a Meeting of Two Mental Processes
The study emphasised that creative art is a kind of investigation or research. Here the study wish to add
that research is a kind of creation. Both are creative processes because the artist and the researcher
have similar characteristics (Lorand, 1991; Storr, 1991; Shoshani, 2002). Even when their objectives
and means of expression are different, both "organise mental data according to new and unconventional
categories … view known phenomena from new angles, discover data in phenomena that others have
ignored, or use familiar means of expression in an original manner" (Noy, 1999: 224). Constructing a
painting is, therefore, like analysing and allotting significance because the "good interpretation of a work
of art … is a creative process in its own right" (Levi, 1986: 130).
the research also want to claim that the interpretation of the finished self-portrait is also a process of
self-investigation. In other words, painting a self-portrait is only the first self-investigation in this study.
Campbell (2002), drawing on the theory of Ricoeur (1991), compares an interpretative reading process
to psychoanalysis. The interpreter brings untold stories to the text, interpretation makes it possible for
these stories to be told, and as they are constructed and create new meanings, the interpreter is
constructed with them. Each and every interpretative reading of the text leads to new meanings,
meanings till now only a potentiality. "As the interpreter creates meaning that causes the text to change,
so does a change occur in himself" (Campbell, 2002: 210).
The creative process features mental mechanisms that combine primary and secondary thought
processes which work together simultaneously (Noy, 1999, 2006).
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