And You Are…?

Self-Portrait Study, Oil on Canvas, 10" x 14"

As I said in my brief update post Good Things Come to Those Who Wait! I’ve tentatively turned my hand to the self-portrait! Indeed, I have a collection of ‘mes’ and ‘not-so-mes’ staring over my shoulder as I type, scrutinising anything I might dare to write about them. So here you have it then, in particular for those who don’t know me, the self-portrait study above is me. Hello world! Great to meet you!

I’ve got a basic likeness down okay and as a beginner I’m really happy with the above self-portrait. Still, there are a few things to be improved upon in my next self-portrait attempt, namely widening my mouth and chin, softening the angularity of my head and generally making myself look less severe! Importantly then, I now know what technical and aesthetic points to look out for when trying to capture my own image in paint.

It’s really quite a strange experience painting yourself. I worked from a photograph specifically taken for the purpose of creating a self-portrait, so I didn’t have to face a mirror and try to stay relatively still for hours on end. I therefore didn’t have to cope with the peculiar situation of having ‘a me’ stare back at me very very intently, thus removing the slightly ghostly feeling associated with painting oneself. In fact, as time passed I found that it wasn’t so much the ghostly presence of another me that I was aware of, instead it was a sort of absence of myself which felt weird. By this I mean that the more I painted the more my image became an object or a simply an image – nothing more and nothing less. Though I always tried to capture myself accurately in my brushstrokes and lines the harder I tried to do this the more my painted self ceased to be a person. I therefore lost all sense of ‘painting myself’ and I felt more like I was just painting any old object again. I no longer recognised my image as an image of myself. I didn’t even feel as if I was painting a stranger, I just felt as though I was painting a thing. My image could have a been a tomato, a shed or a Parisian cityscape and painting it wouldn’t have felt any different.

I don’t know what I was expecting to feel, but the above wasn’t it. Maybe I thought that the strong initial feeling of recognition we experience when we glance at someone we know well would extend and stay with me for the duration of the process. I perhaps thought there’d always be some kind of special feeling associated with painting someone I knew which might manifest itself in a persistent awareness of that person as a living, breathing and feeling human being. Above all else I didn’t expect that person, myself in this case, to disintegrate into just another object to be captured in lines and forms. I don’t think this feeling has affected the outcome in any negative way – it certainly is a living, breathing and feeling me who stars out at you from this page. I’m just really taken aback by the nature of painting a self-portrait and I’m really really quite intrigued and fascinated by it.  So here’s to many more portraits!