Our perception and evaluation of art is built around the larger social idea of what it is. This leads further into the semantic sorts of ideas than I would like to go, but art is *broadly* percieved as expressing intent. For twenty-somethings on the internet like myself, that intent is generally to express the individual. This is certainly not the only intent that may be the base for an artistic work, but the context will render that apparent. If it doesn't, the work fails as art, because it loses meaning without intelligibility. What we consider distinct disciplines of art; music, painting, prose fiction, cinematography, etc. are sets of conventions. Producing artistic work in a chosen discipline is an understanding of rules that the work will reside within. So, the expression of self (artistic intent) is clothed in the forms of the specific discipline. Because of the semantic associations we make with one sensory observation or another, as artists we are able to reference those and create intelligible expression, without explicit verbal statements (think of slow, sad music, or a brightly prancing ballerina, or a dark and foreboding castle on a movie screen). My personality and traits that are formally appealing to me (which are to say the same thing) are languid or introspective sort of ideas. Within the mode of expression of representational painting, this translates fairly literally, where my figures will almost always be in some sort of repose, with low-energy expressions. As a further note to the idea of implicitly taking on a convention, there is greater granularity than just 'painting'; there's any number of subsets with further specificity to their conventions below that. With my paintings I'm generally working within one of those more specific sets of rules, where the partial objective is to showcase one's ability (or lack of) to represent complex forms and lighting more convincingly, so I am somewhat obligated to have figures as a significant element in the picture. This is just to highlight the fact that the expression may take a much more abstract form in another convention--perhaps some mixture of muted blues and grays in organic shapes, if we wanted to stay with something purely visual.