“Who I Really Am” (Alice in Rorschach’s Inkblot Wonderland)

20”x24”, 2022 December.

“Who I Really Am” (Alice in Rorschach’s Inkblot Wonderland), 20”x24”, 2022 December. When you’re a neuroscience nerd confused by life events that recently happened to you, your natural response is to analyze the heck out of them in attempt to understand. You analyze others, analyze yourself, have others analyze you, etc. Much of this was captured in my earlier artwork. Another byproduct of the process is the analysis of the analysis itself. I created this piece just for entertaining purposes – supposedly most of you had to sit down with a shrink at some point to tell them what you see in the famous ten inkblots created by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach: https://towardsdatascience.com/rorschach-tests-for-deep-learning-image-classifiers-68c019fcc9a9.

The test is brilliant in the sense that it utilizes rudiments of abstract art – form, color, line, tone, texture – to draw conclusions about the person on the receiving end. Interpreting art is just as creative process as making it. Reading about its scoring system made me feel amused though: too many naughty answers imply a higher risk for schizophrenia, whereas too few are evaluated as suppressed sexual insecurities. (I was 12 or 13 when I was given this test for the first time.) This reminded me of the famous scene in the movie “Analyze That”, when mafia superstar Paul Vitti (Robert DeNiro) explains in jail what he sees in the card(s): https://youtu.be/E3FbsBTaa5c

All ten (alcohol ink)blots are disguised in this painting - have fun finding them (or at least my versions of them). I don’t know what psychology thinks of people who see all sorts of strange things growing out of their own hair, but I'm guessing probably nothing good...