Self-portrait, pastel on Ingres paper.
I like pastels because they’re immediate. I can get an intuitive reaction onto paper, and then work it at leisure – no need to dry (like oils), or be worked quickly (like acrylics). Suited for family life with unpredictable workloads.
Almost all my visual work begins as pastel studies.
I work intuitively with colour and shape. These drawings are about relationships – with people, places, anything.
Everybody feels different depending on who they’re with … And that feeling fundamentally colours our relationship with that person.
For me, portraits are about (literally) depicting the colour of relationships. And a self-portrait is about depicting my relationship with myself. This requires a little time, honesty, soul-searching, some internal reflection while gazing at my reflection in the mirror.
I used to feel a likeness was important. Then I painted a portrait of an artist friend, which I was pleased with. I commented “I’ve caught a good likeness there”. “Ha ha!”, they replied “apart from the purple skin and green hair!”. I realised that “likeness” is a distraction from what’s actually happening in the painting. I’m now comfortable with abstraction, using the shapes, as well as the colours, in depicting relationship.
After a period of reflection, I start feeling drawn to certain colours: blue and yellow. I start with the cheek, running down between the lines stemming from the corner of my eye. Moving to another part of the paper, the shapes formed by my nose, upper lip, and lower cheek. I avoid classical features, but allow the line of my lower lip, alongside the line of my eyebrows.
My beard and hair are suddenly important, and dominate as upper and lower frames for the drawing. Now I’m pulled towards reds and oranges, mixing with the yellow.
Next I concentrate on the boundary of my face. My reflection is framed by several rectilinear features: bookcase, cassette tapes, door and doorframe; also softer features like the towel draped over the door. These fill the paper between my facial surfaces, appearing in orange.
I stand back and view the collection of part-sketches as a whole. I envision the outcome, the shapes and boundaries that are suggested by the parts, and I divide the drawing with swift lines, snaking around nose, bookcase, cheek-line, towel, lower lip. Nothing remains, the parts have become a new whole; a hidden world has revealed itself.
I continue adding colour, texture and shading, immersed in a trance whose decisions and actions are unaccountable, inexplicable.
Suddenly I awake: it’s almost done. A few colouration issues, and for these I stand back again, assess the balance, and finish up with confidence.
The final task is fixation. Fixative disperses the white, so I go over all the highlights with extra white, then apply the fixative. As it dries, the final image emerges. It’s OK, the painting suggests some interesting things … but there’s room for improvement, things to do differently next time, bits I’ll never be happy with …
