What interesting me most about Bryan Lewis Saunders was his determination to challenge himself. Saunders is known as a radical performance artist and poet mostly known for his spoken word rants and stand up tragedy. However, what Saunders is most known for is his daily self portraits.

On March 30 1995, Saunders began to challenge himself to draw a self portrait everyday for the rest of his life. He has stuck to his goal and so far drawn an estimated 12,400 portraits. While this sounds like a difficult enough daily challenge to keep up with, Saunders decided to begin an even more radical project to experiment with how he sees himself in 2000.

Saunders set himself the task of creating the portraits while under the influence of different recreational and prescribed drugs which he titled “Under the Influence".

These drugs ranged from alcohol to heroin to xanax to psilocybin mushrooms. He set himself the task of experimenting with these drugs to see how they altered his self image. He consumed a different drug everyday for many weeks.

Consequently because of this, Saunders suffered brain damage (which was thankfully reversible) and was completely drained physically so as a result of this, he now only continues with the drug-induced self altering project over longer periods of time and uses the drugs only with the advice of his doctor.

Saunders portraits are a prime example of how drugs change how we see ourselves. We see this especially with the difference between his hash portrait and his pcp portrait. They portray how easily our observance of ourselves can be changed while we are intoxicated.

Furthermore, what was most interesting for me to see was the difference in how his self perception was altered rather than his self image. The aesthetic qualities within the portraits changed with the use of psychedelics. This is shown mostly within his LSD portrait.

The bright colours and exaggerated composition show how the emotion is also depicted as well as his self image.His emotions within the compositions of different portraits differ varying on the type of drug such as the cocaine portrait seems aggressive and loud whereas the marijuana portrait seems relaxed and joyful. His other portraits such as his Klonopin portrait include just a simple crayon drawing where as his opium portrait’s composition is much more complex with its shading and the use of hidden images within his face.

Saunders has been offered multiple opportunities to show his self-portraits at various galleries around the world but due to an exhibition of his being stolen, he is now quite cautious of galleries over fear of losing his work. Although, he has displayed his collection of drug-influenced self-portraits in the La Maison Rouge in Paris.

Click on the link below to the collection of the peculiar, terrifying and entrancing self portraits of Bryan Lewis Saunders.