My Wrestling with God,painting a self-portrait - Video

Hey everybody it's Roya today's painting is a self-portrait where I wrestled with a bunch of Concepts that are scary to me, every painting is a self-portrait in a way cuz you know you cannot separate yourself from everything that you're encountering cuz there's a you in it but a self-portrait is a different level of encountering something where that metaphoric distance when I paint somebody else there's this metaphoric Distance by the lack of that thing looking like me that there's that there's like the the little bit of Degrees of Separation but when you're actually painting yourself that metaphoric distance isn't there so you're forced to do it and in there's this back story about this painting my last name is Abraham in Persian so my last name is something that was interesting to me since I was a kid and also in Persian we have a separate word from the uncle that is your mother's brother and the uncle who's your dad's brother we have two different versions for that word and my dad didn't have any brothers and I always felt the need for having an uncle cuz I tell I don't have an uncle you know if I was an English speaker growing up I never would have felt that and on top of that we're not a close family our family gatherings were was really little growing up and plus it was a secular environment on top of that so my dad had an actual Uncle by actual Uncle I mean the his dad's brother where I saw him probably two or three times in my whole life and it's a secular environment again and there are like eye rolls to the idea of any Abrahamic story but I was captured by the story of Abraham cuz we share our names and I thought that if anybody supposed to get it it would be my dad's Uncle cuz he shares this name like I do maybe my uncle which would be my dad my mom's brother they wouldn't get it cuz you know my mom's brother was kind of an in intellectual counterpart he was the one who made me interested in philosophy and history and heavy books that I enjoy reading but I thought maybe he doesn't get my interest in Abraham cuz he doesn't share my last name so I don't have any Uncle so now that I have an opportunity to spend time with my dad's Uncle maybe I can share my passion for the story of Abraham with him and maybe he would get it so we were in this family gathering and I shared the Abraham story of sacrificing his kid with him and how at the last minute God decided to send the ram animal instead and the Ishmael was saved I don't know if Ishmael is the right word yeah Ishmael was saved okay because I'm thinking of like three languages when I'm using when I'm recounting these stories so forgive me for any kind of incoherent in names like I said my last name is Abraham but in Persian so point is after I finished the story I said I see myself in this characters and he said no if you're following these kinds of stories you're the Sheep who's blindly following the stories you shouldn't sacrifice your kid if some deity asks you to if you do that you're the sheep you're the ram in the story and my little mind was like okay my vulnerability in recounting that story was crushed and I didn't have any response to his objecting, and fast forward to when I painted this painting there's this Rilke poem where he recounts the story of Jacob wrestling with Angel and he says what we constantly desire is to be defeated by something bigger than us that's our successes makes us feel small cuz we want to be small in encountering something bigger we want to be defeated by angels and because that Sublime thing that's made us defeated is actually elevating us to the higher level and this is what painting is to me I want to fail in this path that is bigger than me that it's something something that is worth being a failure encountering it and there are worth and depth in these stories that separate from Dogma proposed by religion and I don't have to eye-roll at my Heritage if if I want to appreciate Abraham's story and Jacob's story I'm entitled to do so while being an atheist and I think to some extent I get my family and their dogmatic atheism but to some other extent I think me as the Next Generation who didn't grow up with any framework for appreciating biblical stories I get to I get to have the privilege of that one generation distance from dogma and a renewal appreciation for these things and I think that particular tiny wound caused by that interaction is kind of healed through painting this painting let's paint.