P1 - Annabelle Pavy - artist statement and doc

[Annabelle Pavy]

To properly understand my portrait, we must first transport ourselves back to the time of the renaissance. In this period, eye glasses were a new invention, not as common and easily attainable as they are today. The first pair of wearable glasses had been invented in the 1280s, just a few hundred years before. Without this invention, many individual’s eyesight, including my own, would have been sadly limited.
In regards to my portrait, I have imagined myself as a young humble merchant, dedicating his time to creating and selling glasses to the general public. A few decisions lead to the exact depiction I have shown. The first was the choice to portray myself as a man. Men, for most of history, have been the head of house, leading families and societies. So in order to falsify myself into the renaissance, I had to abide by societal norms. A woman merchant would have been impossible. The portrait, based with lines and crosshatching, will be later embroidered on a piece of cotton, nodding to my true self. Though I am being depicted as a man, I will always love the more femanine things.
Finally, and most importantly, the choice to be a spectacle merchant has come from my own life. At a very young age, my parents knew my eyesight was poor. First, I was diagnosed with an astigmatism, easily fixed by glasses. But by the age of three my left eye had gotten stuck, my iris permanently aimed at my nose. Though scary, the muscles in my eye were repaired with two surgeries and a few years of an eye patch.
Without today's technology, my ability to see would have been drastically different to what it is now. The threads that make up our clothes, the hairs on our heads, the dust floating in the air. Each of these would have been invisible to my weak eyes. So, if I was to envision myself as anyone in the renaissance, I couldn’t be happier to be a young spectacles merchant, doing his best to make the world a bit less fuzzy and a bit more clearer for others.