Ye Olde Selfe Portraite

Ye Olde Selfe Portraite. To thine own self be true, so the adage goes. Try doing that with a hairy ended stick (paint-brush) and some gloopy, coloured mud (paint). And try creating form with colour whilst peering into the looking glass.

Being honest with yourself about your own appearance isn’t easy. For a start you are looking at a reflection of your face/head, therefore it’s the wrong way round. Your eye and brain flips this about during the act of perception.

The other anomaly about painting Ye Olde Selfe Portraite is: you are inside yourself, looking out. When you paint someone else’s portrait, another metaphysic happens. You look upon them, without a mirror affecting the process, outside them so to speak.

Photo’s are slivers of time; returning to an artwork in the making brings multiple perceptions to it and subject matter. Overlaid so ‘the exposure’ is almost like a non-mechanical cine film of a stationery subject. This has the effect of ‘flattening out’ conjoined mood variations. SP 2 is left undone because I enjoy nuances in the brushwork. Painting should be like poetry, having power to suggest rather than be explicit with graphic detail.

‘The model of last resort’ is usually cheaper than employing someone, but there is little or no conversation to be made. Models talk back. Portrait sitters often want to break awkward silences punctuated by palette knife scraping and brush twiddling. With Ye Olde Selfe Portraite you don’t have the effort and distraction of polite conversation.

In SP 3, a wall eyed clown peers from the cold studio, through veils of smudged pigment. In SP 1, a thick necked, heavy-jowelled man takes a sardonic look at advancing age and receding hairline. Each image tells me something about the way I see myself.

At the present time, painting shouldn’t concern itself with verisimilitude. In Western art history, that has already been done. Plato dismisses such activity (mimesis) as the lowest form of human making.

With tech giants harvesting our thoughts for the sake of a digital shangri-la, the human touch is more valid than ever. It is futile to compete with photography and Artificial Intelligence.

In ‘Thermal drawing, self-portrait’ I used a soldering iron and heat sensitive paper. I couldn’t erase mistakes and had to go with the flow. Hovering the tip of a soldering iron above the surface, marks were elicited by varying temperatures without touch or pressure. I like the uncertainty of this and the resulting appearance of a marine crustacean. Call me ‘Lobbie the Lobster’ or ‘Candice the Crab’ if you like. Ye Olde Selfe Portraite, one way of accounting for yourself.