The Body, The Self

Authored by Sam Crohn | May 25, 2025

What does it mean to know ourselves, especially when who we are is always changing?

The ever-changing idea of the “self” contains myth, ideology, ego, and a continuously unfolding narrative. Over the past five years, I’ve been creating a body of paintings that explores this idea. To me, the self isn’t something fixed. It’s fluid — shaped by memory, emotion, mythology, and time.

My paintings are built on this belief. They evolve, fade, and reconfigure, just as we do. Like the body itself, the work evolves — sometimes fragmenting, sometimes fading, always reconfiguring.

Each painting draws from a personal lexicon of symbols while engaging with archetypes and classical myth. The works evolve through many iterations and states, much like a person does across a lifetime. Many of the symbols I use — hands, eyes, mirrors, vessels — come from a personal visual language tied to myth and the unconscious. I return to these forms not for answers, but for the questions they carry. They help express something universal through the deeply personal.

After living alongside these paintings, I’ve watched them change. Dust settles, colors shift, surfaces wear down. At first, I resisted that — but now, I see it as part of the story. In the same way our bodies carry time, the paintings do too. The process isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence.

I also thread concepts from my tattoo practice into these paintings. Tattoos are living images — they age, stretch, and fade. When I design them, I have to consider how they’ll transform. That awareness of impermanence — of time as a collaborator — deeply informs my paintings. I approach the image as something that must hold its meaning even as it changes, erodes, or disappears. I bring that sensibility into my paintings, where the image must remain potent even as its form dissolves.

The human figure often appears in my work, but not as a traditional portrait. It shows up as presence, gesture, shadow — representing the layered, evolving self we all inhabit. We are not one thing. We are many things at once, and always in motion.

Ultimately, I hope these paintings offer a sense of possibility — that identity doesn’t need to be defined or resolved. It can be soft, shifting, or in-between. In these works, I hope to show a self that is fluid, multilayered, and containing alchemical agency. My work is an invitation to see the self not as a fixed image, but as something alive, alchemical, and beautifully unfinished.