Art 3: Self Portrait

Surrey School district #36 used to have zones setup for each high school, I’m not sure if they still have them now. You had to attend the school in which zone you lived so each high school could have an equal student population. Punjabi people had (and still have) perceptions about which schools are good and which ones are not. The word spreads very fast and Punjabi parents want their kids to go to schools which they believe are ‘good’ for them, or appear to have a good name this changes from time to time depending on which kids from which schools turn out to be corrupt. They tried not to send their kids to the schools that had a bad reputation.

Because of this not all Punjabis followed the zoning rule; the Tamanawis student population rapidly increased from 1996 onwards. The other reason for this was the real bad image of the rival school, Princess Margaret a few blocks away had; no one wanted to send their kids to PM back then. The school district decided to make a new high school by dividing the Tamanawis zone into two.

While Sullivan heights was being built the our school was filled to capacity and so morning and afternoon shifts were introduced. I decided to take the morning Art 11 class at 7:30 so I’d have on block off after lunch. A lot people who I knew were in this class as well so it turned out to be a lot of fun. Mr. Therian was our teacher and besides art we talked about many other subjects including the Sikh struggle and human rights violations in Punjab.

Halfway though the year we had to make a self portrait and it was worth 20% of the final grade. I drew one the second day and one every class after that. The one below is the first one I made in about 20 minutes. The portrait below is the one I submitted and got 97% on. I have a few of the other ones I made in class but most of them are lost. Some students took more than 4 weeks to complete just one. This ones done entirely with an HB pencil on a poster like thick sheet of paper, it’s about 14X21 inches. It was shot was a PowerShot A85 at 4 megapixels and then compressed.