Hopefully from this you can get an idea of the low-grade artistry we're dealing with.
These portraits are generally terrible. Very few of the artists actually manage to provide any sort of realistic depiction of their own facial features, and most of them use an incredible infantile form of minimalism when using simple dots for eyes or a straight line for a mouth, which is really quite ineffective at portraying the idiosyncrasies of the human form. I don't know how these untutored philistines have the gall to sell my mother such a weak piece of art. To be quite frank, my nine-year-old niece could provide a better portrait than most of the ones featured on this tea towel. Admittedly at nine years old my niece is older than most of the artists on the towel, but at least she doesn't have the ludicrous delusions of grandeur that these young art students seem to entertain.
I think at this point it is important to show you a number of individual examples, so that you can really see the standard of some of these atrocious portraits. The first one I want to show you is by a man named Joel:
At least I assume Joel is his name.; he seems to have used some sort of snail-like creature in place of the letter 'e.'
This portrait of Joel's is hopelessly abstract, and he seems completely incapable of drawing anything resembling a human being. He seems to have drawn two eyes and then from one of these eyes sprouts two stick-thin legs and one of his arms. Joel has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the human form. It appears that he believes the left eyeball is the central crux of the human body, from which all other limbs and body parts grow. I wonder if Joel even so much as glanced in a mirror or some other random reflective surface before he drew this picture of himself. I highly doubt that Joel's limbs actually sprout from his left eyeball, as I am unsure whether it would even be possible for an eyeball to provide the necessary blood flow and nerve endings in order to control two arms and a leg. If a human could survive with such a deformed body shape, then I don't think they would be able to produce such a life-like image of themselves on a tea towel. Besides, even if this genuinely is how Joel looks, he has missed the point; the tea towel is only meant to be covered in facial portraits, and the rest of the body is superfluous. In order to maintain a sense of congruity with the other portraits he only needed to draw himself from the shoulders upwards. Perhaps he is incapable of following simple instructions, what with all his energy seemingly being spent on controlling three heavy limbs through his left eyeball.
Let's move on from Joel to another young artist called James:
His portrait is at a slight angle because I'm too lazy/incompetent to fix it.
James' picture is another strange one. Like Joel, he seems to be unaware of the places from which limbs attach to the body. However while Joel at least knew the correct number of limbs usually found on humans, it looks like James thinks that he has about 8 limbs, all of which grow straight from his head. I think what James has done, is instead of drawing his own face, he has drawn what he imagines he would look like if he were a spider. It's odd the way such simple instructions can be misconstrued in such a ridiculous fashion. Sebastian is another man that has fundamentally misunderstood the task required of him:
His portrait is that big thing in the middle, in case you too have trouble interpreting pictures.
What Sebastian has done here, is he has heard the instruction "Sebastian, can you please draw a self-portrait for me," and interpreted this as "Sebastian, can you please draw a picture of Diglett from the animated children's television series 'pokémon' for me." Seriously, he has just drawn a picture of Diglett. If you don't know what Diglett looks like, (you disappoint me) study this:
Diglett
Then this:
Sebastian
They're the same! I don't know how he could make that mistake; he must be a total idiot. You know, I would find this funny except my mother paid a lot of money for this tea towel; it cost almost four pounds. Therefore I'm going to do the only reasonable thing I can do, and I'm going to go down to Cumnor Primary School with this ten-year-old, used tea towel and demand my mother's hard-earned money back. She paid for a collection of self-portraits by local young artists; she did not pay for a poorly drawn depiction of Diglett.
