The Panic Self-Portrait

 

“I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.”

 Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1891.

 

“Why is the image of the erect penis now privileged as a cathected object for political prohibition? A new drive towards male Puritanism in which the Madonna image does a gender flip? No longer woman as ‘sacred vessel’, but the erect penis as a prohibited object of the gaze. A sacramentalized penis which can fall under a great visual prohibition because it is now the sacred object. Perhaps a last domain of innocence for anxious men, desperate about all of the gains made by movements for sexual liberation. And so the erect penis is encoded with all the liturgical trappings of a scared vessel: the ideological prohibition of the gaze, an unseen object of veneration, an erectile domain of semiotic innocence.”

Arthur & Marilouise Kroker, The New Sacred Object, The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory, Macmillan, 1991, P. XIII.

 

“Never too distraught to paint: that is the paradoxical precondition of self-portraits in which artists parade the wounds inflicted on their bodies, souls or self-esteem. A cooling off has to take place for the act of creation to occur, one cannot just fire off in anger. Yet the result may approximate to those injured letters we compose in our heads in the middle of the night, rewriting the lines until they become unimpeachably righteous, but very rarely send in the morning.”                                

Laura Cumming, A Face to the World, Harper Press, 2009, P217.

 

What did I hope to achieve with my nude self-portraits? What induces an artist to depict himself naked, screaming, masturbating or attempting to castrate himself? What did I hope to accomplish with these works - which have hardly been exhibited in Ireland never mind abroad? Who did I think was my audience? Where did I think they would be exhibited?                                                                       

 

Well, what has to be understood, is just how private my early work was, and how little I thought of an audience, or future exhibitions. But given that, I saw my nude self-portraits as the logical extension to what artists like Egon Schiele had started. I presumed that when I did approach an art gallery, they would immediately understand my vision and recognize my genius! What a fool I was!                        

 

Because of my extreme introversion, anxiety, and life brought up in a media saturated world, most of my self-portraits were painted from Polaroid’s, video-stills, photographs, and JPEGs. Self-loathing, I did not like looking at myself in the mirror, I found it tedious, and disliked the limited number of expressions and positions I could capture looking in a mirror. My use of second-hand imagery to paint myself from, was also a reflection of my own alienation from myself, because of a lifetime of disassociating myself from my mother and her abuse. Moreover, even though my self-portraits represented the purest expression of my existence, my personal touch, and my likeness, they also reflected my relationship to the art of the past. Time and time again, I painted myself in the manner of other artists, especially when my self-confidence was at its lowest. So, I painted myself like Rembrandt, Schiele, Picasso, Gerstl, Basquiat, and Schnabel. As such, my work said as much about the artists I admired at the time, as my own emotional condition. Therefore, many of my self-portraits were constructions, with a gallery of predecessors guiding my hand in my least convincing self-portraits. I also felt more confessional at different periods - and I was willing to reveal more of my inner state than at others. At the turn of the millennium, I started making artworks in which I placed my naked self, amongst groups of rowdy women, and later even changed the features of the male porn stars in my porn paintings into my own. Moreover, while many artists have painted self-portraits, especially in their youth, hardly any have in later life made a series of self-portraits of themselves as a child, teenager, or young man, either from old photographs, their memory or imagination. Because as an older man, I turned self-portraiture into a form of autobiographical storytelling and compounded narcissism upon narcissism. Finally, like most expressionist artists, everything I painted from pornography, and landscapes, to abstracts were also a disguised form of self-portraiture.

 

Anyone who has ever looked at a large body of self-portraits, must quickly recognise that one self-portrait looks pretty much the same as another. There are only so many ways a self-regarding man can depict himself, usually staring smugly or seriuosly out at the viewer, pallet and brushes in hand! Most self-portraits suffer from being contrived and stilted. Most self-portraits are such fake posturing it is hard to take them seriously. Others seem like painted versions of the kind of selfies people take for dating websites and are just as manipulative and fake. Instead of being merciless observations of the artist, they become a vanity exercise depicting them as they would like to be seen, especially in the professional world. For me, the self-regard of most self-portraits is nauseating. Far too often artists merely produce glamorous propaganda for themselves. It is gob smacking, to see male artists’, try to present themselves as thoughtful geniuses with their “look at me I am an Old Master” pastiches, and female artists try to present themselves as stunningly beautiful. Especially when I see what they look like in reality! Thus, self-portraiture is often just another form of delusional fantasy and wish fulfilment. Often one feels that the artist has even less understanding of themselves than we their audience. The history of self-portraits in Western art is a comparatively short one – starting with the late Gothic period when coincidently artists also first started signing their paintings and establishing themselves as more than mere artisans. In sixteenth century Venice, the first commercial production of mirrors began and with its popular up-take, the production of self-portraits by western artists became a common obsession.                                                                                                                                    

 

Self-portraiture is only a sub-genre of a genre – portraiture. However, when created by master psychologists and technically superb painters (like Dürer, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Schiele, or Lucian Freud) it is to my mind – the greatest of all genres. It is the closest painting ever gets to pure autobiography. Self-portrature is often an excuse for self-love in all it’s forms – even atuo-erotisim. Artists create self-portraits for many different reasons. They may make them in order to declare their membership of an esteemed profession (not a anyomous craft), to advertise their skills to patrons, as a record of self-love, in place of an unavailable model, as an expreiment in a new style or technique - or merely to pass the time. The results may be a superb form of self-anylisis – self-critical, unmerciliess and wise - or mere posturing bluster.

 

In self-portraits the artist is freed from the expectations and limitations that other figuritive genres like commisioned portrature or elaborate figure compositions impose. The artist is releaved of the need to flatter a sitter – though very often they end up flattering their own vanity.  This is because in the self-portrait the artist is both the subject and the interogtor. This is both the strenght and weakness of it as a genre. It depends on the artist having the courage to see himself as he really is – devoid of smug pretence or vanity. Few artist have been able to summon up this kind of dispassionate self-interpretation – but I think I was one. When looking at my self-portraits one is reminded of similar anguished works by Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, Lovis Corinth, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Max Beckman, Otto Dix, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. In fact, many of my self-portraits were undermined - by both my slavish copying of photographs or video tapes of myself - but also by my internal memory and imitation of other artist’s self-portraits. Thus, many of my self-portraits that claimed expressive, existential authenticity and immediacy - were in fact simulacrums of expressivity and pastiches or other men’s confessions.                                                                                            

 

Few other artists in art history have painted themselves as frequently or as obsessively as I have. As a solipsist, I believed all reality was subjective, which is why I placed myself and all my dreams, desires, fears and fantasies at the centre of my art. In my art, I emphasized my ego, extreme subjectivity, my body and psychological torment. I displayed my ego in extremely narcissistic and exhibitionistic ways. In the last twenty-eight years, I must have created over 350 self-portrait paintings and drawings. That is more self-portraits than van Gogh and Rembrandt combined - and it matches the narcissism of Egon Schiele! My self-portraits have ranged in size from huge 80” x 60” (203 x 152.5cm) canvases to A4 size doodles, from oil on canvas to watercolours, pastels, brush and Indian ink drawings, to pencil sketches. 

                                                                                                                                 

 

Most of my early self-portraits were recognizably me - however many of my later works were ambiguous everyman figures. Moreover, one could almost say, that everything I painted was a self-portrait even if was in the guise of a landscape, still life, text picture or abstract. Even my female nudes and pornographic whores were in some way a projection of myself through another form.                       

 

It should be pointed out, that when I write of the Panic Self-Portrait - I am talking also of the nude self-portrait - since 50% of my self-portraits where in fact nude self-portraits. It was my nude self-portraits that were the most extreme manifestation of my narcissistic exhibitionism and creative wildness. The history of the nude male self-portrait stretches as far back to Dürer’s drawing Nude Self-Portrait of 1503/06. Early in 20th century Richard Gerstl and Egon Schiele both created major psychologically charged nude self-portraits – and it was their crucial influence - which shaped my own self-portraits.

            

I often painted myself against blank backgrounds of a single colour - devoid of any reference to physical space - or I placed myself within a maelstrom of gestural paint that threatened to violently dissolve my form. I have painted and drawn myself in mundane and naturalistic ways. I have painted myself dressed and undressed. I have painted myself - in tormented expressionist manners. I have deconstructed my mind in collages and text works, and I have used my face and figure as an everyman character in symbolic canvases. My self-portraits are not, by any strech of the imagination, conventionally beautiful. They are often technically clumsy (inept drawing, crude tonal values, jarring colours and rough brush work) but they have an unfliching honesty rare in a sub-genre filled with such vain work. Despite their technical limitations, these painting and drawings of myself, prove that great painting is not always about refined skills deployed with reason.

 

Few years have gone by without me making at least one self-portrait. Influenced by Romantic notions of artistic genius, I thought self-portraits were central to the creation of my own artistic identity. They were experimental grounds where I could develop my own style. They were also the most effective way to unite my art and life together into a biographical whole. They created an intimacy between myself and my viewer - where I could seduce, plea for pity or salvation or scream defiantly. For fans of my work, my self-portraits have always been central to my art - particularly those of 1991. My early self-portraits of 1987-1991 – pictorially dramatized my emancipation from my mother. Like much adolescent art - mine was obsessed with my own identity. I investigated my subjective depths – even in the face of self-contradiction and lack of an audience. Oddly, between 1987 and 1988, I made my first self-portraits by taking poses from photographs of other men and women and reimagining them as myself. Then from 1988-90, I painted myself naked from Polaroid photographs I had taken of myself. It was only in late 1990, that I made my first drawings of myself from a mirror, but I found this traditional approach limiting and chose to not pursue this naturalistic method. So, in 1991, I started to take video footage of myself naked - and painted from my television screen in my bedroom. This method I found suited my peculiar objectification and dramatization of Self. Thus, my early self-portraits recorded my search for an authentic self – through various means of technological mediation.           

 

It should be noted, that in my early self-portraits, especially those of 1991, I often made two to four different versions of my self-portraits, one in a realist style, a couple in an expressionist style (though drawn and composed and structured far more than a typical Expressionist painting), and maybe one in an Art Brut style. This may have been yet another reflection of my borderline personality disorder, lack of insight to my illness, and disassociation.                                                                       

 

Since all my art was based upon almost total self-obsession, not on a love for anyone or anything else, it was natural that my self-portraits represented the zenith of my art. Yet my self-portraits raised many questions, like did see myself as a hero or villain, potent or broken, nihilistic or redeeming. For my self-love was undermined by a vicious and sick self-loathing. My best self-portraits were egotistical or suicidal performances which were produced in unrepeatable moments of despair, exhalation, or crisis.

 

My merciless and revealing self-portraits revealed a lifelong self-analysis and dialogue with myself. My self-portraits recorded my masculinity in all its lonely aspects. They reflected my inability to conform to the rules of society and my existential anxiety and isolation. I made visible all my inner conflicts and feelings of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, sexual longing, impotence, and longing for love.

 

My self-portraits were narcissistic forms of self-communication, self-questioning, deconstruction of identity and expressions of my profoundly alienated existence on the margins of society. They recorded my battle to understand myself - and the world around me. There was nothing understaded or modest about my self-examination. There was nothing sensual, spiritual or erotic about my frequent nakedness in these paintings. However, there was a self-indulgence and maipulitive quality to my narcissistic work which Peter Schjeldahl had noticed in other work by artists in the 1980’s: “Narcissism floods the world with the projected self. Observation, conception and execution become a closed circuit, charged by their resonance with the narcissist’s own moment-to-moment inner workings. The first and last audience for narcissistically created art is the narcissist who creates it. Only the narcissist’s nonart needs - worldly ambition and dread of isolation - carry the work out to others, on whom extraordinary demands for tolerance and complicity are made.” (Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1991, P.5.

             

While High Modernism from the late 1920’s to the mid-1970’s had deemed portraiture and self-portraiture anti-modern and redundant, Post-Modernism saw a revival of portraiture and especially self-portraiture. Just a few notable examples of this resurgence were Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman in photography, Antony Gormley in sculpture and more relevant to my own art; Georg Baselitz, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Rainer Fetting, Albert Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Jiři Georg Dokoupil, Walter Dahn and Julian Schnabel in painting. However, their work was marked by a professional sophistication absent in my early warped, self-taught, naïve, and clinically insane youthful self-portraits.

                                                                                                       

             

Over the years, my own self-portraits were influenced to varying degrees, by the example of artists as varied as; Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Franz Xavier Messerschmitt, Vincent van Gogh, James Ensor, Edvard Munch, Lovis Corinth, Pablo Picasso, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Lucian Freud, Arnulf Rainer, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Albert Ohelen, Werner Büttner, Walter Dahn, Jiři Georg Dokoupil, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jonathan Meese.

                                                                               

From my birth until the age of eight or nine, I was photographed constantly by my parents and enjoyed the process. Looking at the photographs of me from 1971-1978 one is struck by what a happy, boisterous and outgoing boy I was. But then in a photograph from the Christmas of 1980 taken with my cousins, aunt and mother – I appeared sad and withdrawn. That photograph subliminally recorded the trauma I had started to suffer at the hands of my mentally ill mother - and my growing sense of shame and alienation - from the world. Then apart from one malignant and miserable passport sized photo of me at sixteen - there is no photograph of me until 1993 when I appeared morose and withdrawn. At the age of fourteen, I had destroyed every photo of myself, I could lay my hands on. And I refused to be photographed. My apocalypse of self had been influenced by seeing my mother destroy any photograph of my father’s first family or of her own family when I was about eleven. Looking through my family photo albums it is as though I dropped off the face of the earth from 1981-1993. A combination of my mother’s illness, my teenage self-loathing and psychiatric illness meant that I loathed being photographed for over ten years, save for a couple of photos of myself on holiday with my mother or passport and identity card photos. Even when I was making numerous self-portraits from 1987-1993, I would immediately destroy their photographic or video source as soon as the painting was finished. Then suddenly in late 1993, after meeting the narcissist Edward Tynan, I began photographing myself compulsively and continued to do so for the next couple of decades. Yet I never considered these photographs as artworks in their own right. For me they were merely documentation. I only considered (and still consider) my drawn and painted self-portraits artworks.                                   

 

Like much adolescent art, mine was autobiographical, sexually obsessed and concerned with metaphysical questions. It was fuelled by testosterone and born from night-time visions. Coming into my own as a painter as an adolescent, my early art reflected my bewildered, morbid and thwarted sexuality. In my early self-portraits I confessed to my anti-social shyness, adolescent anger, melancholy, transvestitism, homoerotic tendencies, addiction to masturbation, obsession with pornography, desire to castrate myself and wish to die. Paradoxically, for someone who has painted so many self-portraits, from the age of about eleven to twenty-three, I avoid being photographed at all costs. But I would take photographs and video of myself and paint from them. Yet, after I had completed the painting, I would destroy the photos or video tapes. I began painting my first self-portraits at the age of sixteen in 1987, but it was not until 1989 that I began to produce truly ambitious and psychologically insightful self-portraits. My earliest self-portraits of 1987-1988 (which were mostly portrait busts) conveyed a guarded mood of celibate remoteness, unapproachability, self-pity, and defiance. In an age when those in the art world questioned the old notions of heroic genius, I gauchely memorialized myself as though I was the most important artist in the world. As a post-photographic painter, I saw little need to produce a naturalistic image of myself, rather I sought to paint how I felt inside and reveal my subjectivity and show up the self-censorship, and idealism of conventional portraits by the academics I despised.

            

My early self-portraits show me desperately trying to create a myth around myself; however, my self-revelation was aggressive, desperate, troubling, and unattractive. I seemed to challenge the viewer to despise me more than I despised myself and I revealed myself as obnoxiously self-centred, self-pitying, and profoundly narcissistic. My ugly self-portraits were a form of confessional where I revealed my adolescent solipsism, anxiety, terrifying and frustrated lust, fantasies of power and later my suicidal despair. I childishly thought that painting was still the be all and end all of existence and assumed the whole world would see my own art in the same way too. My adolescent hero-worship of other artist like van Gogh and Egon Schiele, made me wish that others would hero worship me, yet the gauche melodramatic, sixth-year nature of my adolescent rage made me laughable and pitiful to many. A spoiled and troubled mother’s boy, I wanted to project myself as a gorgeous artistic hero but was let down by my ugliness and lack of cool – yet defiantly made that the subject of my self-portrayal. My early self-portraits were theatres of the self, in more ways than one.  They were an odd mix of attempts to see myself as saint, genius, woman, or even young girl and all were fake self-portraits where I had taken a photographic image of someone else and turned them into an image of myself. They had a stilted and measured quality missing in my later works. From the start, I made myself the hero and villain of all my stories.

           

Although I had tried in my first self-portraits to picture myself as a heroic figure - trying on different styles and guises to puff up my ego, when I began to photograph myself naked with a Polaroid camera in 1989, and then used those images to create my first naked self-portraits, I had to confront my own disgust and self-hatred. I presented myself as a diabolical, perverted and misanthropic adolescent male. I loathed my adolescent, weak, thin body and my chinless ugly face and had to make this apparent in my work. Egon Schiele may have been my hero - but unlike him - I loathed myself. So it was in these first nude self-portraits that I confronted my own inadequacies and began to speak honestly even if it was in a rather generic expressive style.  I even began to depict myself masturbating and turned my relationship with the viewer into that of a sordid peepshow. The technical crudity of these self-portraits from 1989-90 reflected my self-loathing. As a punk painter, I made a self-conscious decision to paint ‘ugly’ self-portrait paintings as a reflection of my own troubled self-loathing and contempt for conventional painters. In fact, at this time I found most ‘pretty’ paintings repellent in their deceitfulness. Besides, I knew from art history, that even the ugliest paintings could become beautiful with time and a change in taste.                                                                               

           

Within my self-portraits, I investigated the nature of my identity as it was constructed and perceived by myself. They also recorded my changing sexual image; from my transvestite drawings in 1987, through consciously homoerotic images of myself as a sexual object in 1989, to my slowly maturing, tormented, heterosexual depictions of myself struggling with impotence and fear of women in 1991. I also played with different forms of personality from extrovert to introverted, from exhibitionistic to voyeuristic, from tormented to grandiose. In my self-inspection, the line between playacting and genuine confession was blurred as I tried on many different guises. So, I was later shocked that so many people assumed my self-portraits were homosexual and could not appreciate this process of self-discovery and revelation.

              

In my nude-self-portraits of 1989-1993 – I was an Oedipus in revolt, displaying my revulsion at my own body and protesting suffocation of my mother, and conformism of Irish society. I depicted my corporeal body in the grip of shameful instincts and unbridled emotions. My paintings became outcries in paint as raw and vulnerable as the tragic victim I had become. They recorded my alienation from society and were an outcry against it. My self-portraits were part of a dangerous process of remorseless self-examination in which I risked my sanity. My ego inflation and the absolutist importance I attached to my subjective experience risked total psychosis - as I pitilessly recorded my loss of psychic control. The undomesticated rawness and power of my self-portraits of 1989-1991 - belied the fact that they were made by a twenty-year old in a suburban bedroom. They documented my remorseless self-analysis. These works were inspired by the anguish of the German Gothic and Expressionist painters and the puritan Irish Catholic belief in original sin.

             

However, I only ever painted a handful of paintings or drawings of myself with an erect penis. There were two watercolours in 1987, three alkyd paintings in 1990 and two pencil and one Indian ink drawings in 1993 and my large painting Simulacrum from 1995. Such a small number of images of myself proudly erect was symptomatic of my self-loathing sexuality.

 

From January 1991 - I would stage myself screaming, masturbating, and despairing in front of my video camera. I would then pause the video tape and then traced acetate drawings off the television which I transferred to paper or canvas. My image thus appeared through and even despite the frenzied, inchoate brushstrokes and heightened colours of my painting style. When outside the house or interacting with my mother and tenants and even when in McGonagles trying to meet a girl, I was stone faced, monitoring my every facial expression, and trying to give absolutely nothing away. But in these new violent paintings - painted alone in me bedroom - I gave vent to my pent-up anguish and existential pain. Their psychological record of mental confusion, psychic decay, depravity, alienation, and crisis made these works so powerful - and outside of the usual rules and subtleties of academic art. Later in mid-1991, I started to depict myself attempting to cut my wrists, throat, or penis. In fact, from 1987 to late 1991, there was a slow escalation in the violence of my self-portraits, both in what I depicted myself doing, and in the ways, I chose to stylistically convey it. Moreover, my self-mutilation paintings of mid-1991 - anticipated and preceded the actual cutting of my wrists in late 1991. However, in a way a perverse way, by painting myself attempting self-harm – the desire was briefly purged from me.     

 

My Panic Self-Portraits of 1991 were filled with a ferocious self-hate and threat of violence towards the viewer and towards myself. In them I was consumed by persecution mania and egotistical despair. I challenged the viewer like a destructive anarchistic and madman – a danger to myself and to others. In these passive-aggressive works I depicted myself consumed with narcissistic self-loathing, anguish and despair. There was nothing flattering or precious about my treatment of my own features – I depicted my body stripped naked – pathologically tormented by self-hate and my penis worn raw. My paintings and drawings of 1991 vividly recorded the trials and tribulations of my mental life. They were a self-inquisition into the nature of my existence. They disclosed my isolated, bizarre, and tortured existence – locked in my bedroom and in my house. In my early self-portraits I gave pictorial shape to my inner demons by using my body as a prop in my  psycho-dramas. These paintings (mostly painted in the small hours of the night) were a conflgration of self-anylisis, sick narrcissim and self-hate.                   

 

However, my self-portraits were also forms of role-playing. As I have said, in my self-portraits I played the part of a woman, transvestite, saint, homosexual, isolationist, genius, monk, outcast, and madman. In this I followed a long line of artists from; Rembrandt who depicted himself as Biblical characters, Corinth who painted himself as a Teutonic warrior clad in armour, Picasso who in early years painted himself as a Harlequin and in later years as a Minotaur, or Ensor, Georges Rouault and Beckman who painted themselves as a clown - and Egon Schiele who painted himself as a monk.

 

In later years, my lovers like Helen and Carol would laugh when they looked through my photo albums - which were filled with photographs of me. “You love yourself, don’t you?” They would giggle. They knew I did not love myself, but they could not fathom my self-involvement.

           

While most of my self-portraits showed me alone some included porn stars, prostitutes, and later girlfriends. In early paintings like Eros & Thantos from late 1990 or The Prophet, from early 1991, I depicted myself screaming overlapped upon images of lovers or beautiful women – an expression of my impotent rage and terror of sexuality. In self-portraits like Dog King from the spring of 1991, I stood naked with a can of Budweiser staring out of the painting, my body over laid upon a couple fucking and a leering topless porn star. Painted at a time when I was not only a virgin but also rarely drank - it was an example of dreaming about myself as a man about town. Later works like Freak from later in 1991 depicted me naked putting a knife to my penis over an image of a porn star with her legs spread and it was truer to my sense of suicidal impotence. I wanted to express the feelings of suicidal impotence and self-hatred images of porn stars induced in me. In later drawings from 1992-3, I drew quick sketches of myself having sex with prostitutes in Amsterdam. In 1994, I drew my first drawing of myself with a girlfriend. In 2007, I painted several acrylic and oil stick nude portraits of myself and my second girlfriend Carol and in 2008, I painted one of us looking lovingly into each other’s eyes, revealing our self-sufficient and insular love.

 

There are striking similarities between my nude self-portraits which are often quite bisexual looking and the sexualised and agonised way I presented myself and the porn stars I painted as equally sexualised and agonised. In fact, remembering that my earliest self-portraits included transsexual self-portraits and self-portraits as a woman, it might be said that at least some of the porn stars I painted were in fact self-portraits. My grimacing and screaming in many of my self-portraits mirrored the screams of pleasure and sexualized grimacing of my porn stars. My self-portraits also verged from expressions of phallic power and mastery to self-castration obsessions that despaired at my failure as a man. Auto-Destruction was my first castration painting, and it was soon followed by; Freak, Nothingness and My Life Is Shit. Both Auto-Destruction and Freak combined the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat with the self-mutilations of Rudolf Schwarzkogler.  Showing myself attempting to cut off my penis – I was confessing to my sexual guilt and shame.

 

Another less obvious form of self-portrait in my work was my text paintings which began in 1990 with me adding a few words to my figurative paintings in 1989 and by 1992 had come to dominate works with no figurative element. In my text paintings I revealed what could not been seen in conventional figurative representations of myself – namely the inner works of my mind.

 

By 1992, after being committed twice to a psychiatric institution, put on medication, and undergoing electro convulsive therapy, my sense of self had been shattered. What few self-portraits I did make were obscured with slashes of paint and my interest in depicting myself had waned. I concentrated more on pornographic, text and abstract work. In the summer of 1993, I drew a series of drawings, of my scared and bandaged left arm – glorying in my self-mutilation and trying to comprehend the reason for it. However, the level of solitary intensity which my work had between 1987-1993 - could not be sustained and even before meeting Edward in September 1993, my self-portraits had taken a back seat to pornographic and text images. After meeting Edward and developing a social life, I made fewer and fewer self-portraits and those I did make tended to be more superficial and cursory. Moreover, even in my large self-portraits of 1995 like The Broken Staff False Dawn and Simulacrum their sexual explicitness, huge scale, theatricality, and operatic quality obscured the loss of real intensity and the start of my ironic playacting. I began to be aware of an audience for my self-portraits and began adjusting them in accordance. Gone was direct confession and in its place came transgressive oratory.                                                                                                                   

Most of my self-portraits of 1997-2002, were Indian ink drawings taken from acetate tracings of video screen grabs. They were both more of the real world and more of a fantasy world in which I interacted with women I had collaged into my existence.

            

At the turn of the millennium as I experienced my first success with the Oisín Gallery, I began to produce ink drawings of myself naked and surrounded by leering and cackling women or with groupies infatuated with my fame. Although the subject matter was loaded with psychological torment – the actual works had a conceptual distance, elegance and irony utterly absent in my early depictions of myself. Then in 2002, I created a series of pornographic watercolours in which I replaced the male porn star with myself – thus placing myself within the pornographic realm.

             

My self-portraits of 2003-2007, were like art student attempts to reconnect to a lost sense of self. Their messages were subtler and less convinced of the power of communication. Most were bust self-portraits, though typically bare chested - a vestige of my previous transgressive daring. I looked out of my paintings with a pleading look of despair and doubt.                                           

           

What I did not count on when making my extreme teenage self-portraits - was the effect they would have on me as an adult. Looking back on them decades later, I could not fathom what I was trying to achieve with these works, and I was ashamed of them. However, I did feel sorry for the boy I was. I felt less sympathetic towards my arrogant version of me that drew himself fucking women in my work of 2001-2. That is why by 2007, I felt sickened and mortally ashamed of my years of transgression, which prompted me in 2007 to I paint a series of monoprint self-portraits that I collaged alongside text, and which spoke of my sense of eternal damnation. From 2007-2009, I collaged naked photographs of myself into mad looking collages that also included images of wargaming, brochures for paints I used, cigarette and Legal High packaging, psychiatric medication and pain killer packaging, art works that had inspired me and photographs of places I had visited. They were a kind of autobiography through purchases. In 2007, I also mounted rejection letters from art galleries onto watercolour paper and then painted quick demented looking self-portraits on top of them with added words like “talentless”, “idiot” and “reject”. 

           

Near the end of 2007, I painted Dreaming of America, a portrait of myself asleep at the age of nearly seven, holding a Mickey Mouse cuddly toy. It was based on a photograph that my mother had taken of me on the plane back from America in 1977. I did not know it at the time, but this painting would inspire many self-portraits of myself based on old family photos, culminating with This Too Shall Pass in mid-2018, an oil painting of myself as a child, painted over an old oil painting of Chinese junks boats my parents owned, and which had graced the wall in our home since I was child. In my paintings of myself as a child, I found an unlimited new subject, in which I tried to process the pain and torment of my childhood. I transformed my banal family photographs, into tragic expressions of my subconscious pain and sorrow.

         

Then in 2008, I returned to the subconscious fury and pain of my 1991 self-portraits in a new series of psychotic self-portraits that spoke of my rage, egotism, and alienation. My insane self-portraits of 2008-2014, were more mutilated and defeated than ever before. Usually, they were limited to head and shoulders images – full of sadness and resignation.

                                                                      

          

In June 1993, I drew sketches of myself with prostitutes in Amsterdam from memory. At the start of September 2008, I painted from my imagination three watercolours of myself passing the prostitute’s windows in Amsterdam and nearly a year later, I followed these up with an acrylic painting of the same theme in late October 2009. In these works, I depicted myself as grotesque and shameful - and the prostitutes as frightening and shameless.

              

 

In my self-portraits of 2009, I depicted myself grieving at my mother’s coffin and frantic with guilt and shame. These were among my first self-portraits painted from my imagination and not a mirror, photograph, or TV monitor. I began to situate myself in specific situations that I recalled presenting my life as a tragic mystery of alienation. Typical of these works and others from the same period - was the disembodied view of myself in various situations - like a character in my own tragic play. At the same time from 2009-2014, another subset of my self-portraits, were paintings of young boys who were subliminal surrogates for myself as a child. The first of these works like Dancing with My Mother and Walking with Darth Vader were made after my mother’s death when my thoughts returned to my childhood.

 

In 2013, I made a series of self-portrait drawings of myself made from a mirror (a rare procedure for me) which I then collaged into abstract paintings that spoke of my artist defeat and mental self-torture. In my Clown paintings of 2014, which were thinly disguised self-portraits, I played with the alter ego of a sad clown in what were some of my most ironic and Post-Modern works.  

 

At the end of the same year, I also produced a series of watercolours of myself as a young boy - based on photographs my half-brother Patrick had given me. In these works, I was trying to reconnect with my former childish self. Also, at the end of 2014 and start of 2015, I also produced a new series of nude self-portraits in poses like ones I had taken as a young twenty-year-old. I thought it was interesting to contrast my younger, leaner self with my fatter and older self. I produced pastels, watercolours, and acrylic paintings in this new series of nude self-portraits.

 

Between mid-2016 and 2020, I made a several self-portraits in which I was set amongst pornographic scenes. Like in my Pornographic Mapping watercolour and gouache paintings, or my couple of Rank Prophet oil on wooden panel paintings, in which I overpainted pornographic images with self-portrait heads. Then there were quick brush and Indian ink self-portraits based on family photos which I drew on top of pages of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or my Self-Portraits within Culture, in which I drew brush and Indian ink self-portraits include nudes, on top of carefully cut and collaged images from vintage pornography, anatomical diagrams, vintage erotic art works or music album covers.                                                                                                                         

 

On the other hand, I also made more conventional self-portraits including my Wraith Self-Portraits of 2017, a series of white acrylic self-portraits, on small grey and black sheets of Fabriano pastel paper or tinted Khadi cotton rag. In these, ghost like self-portraits, painted with a variety of shades of white, I explored extreme chiaroscuro lighting to heighten the expressiveness of my anguish. Between 2019-2021, I made several watercolour and Indian ink bare chested or nude self-portraits as well as conventional realist self-portraits embracing Carol.         

 

In the mid-summer of 2021, I made a series of paintings of myself as a young man. I made some watercolours from memory, of me losing my virginity to various prostitutes in Amsterdam in 1992. I contrasted my terrified blue body with the warmth of the prostitutes’ bodies. Then I made five acrylic paintings of myself aged sixteen and eighteen, based on old photos. I looked so woebegone, gaunt, and nerdy in these old photos, and they were painful for me to contemplate never mind paint. Because I had to relive my teenage self-hate. On two of the paintings of myself, I overpainted in cadmium red, a list of things a young man should do to avoid the temptations of women, on another I crossed out my face, and on another two, I painted the words ‘ugly shit’, all three using cadmium red paint straight from the tube. I also made from memory, two gouches of me dancing alone in McGonagles nightclub in 1990-2. I painted myself life Frankenstein’s monster or Dr Caligari, coloured in blue, and alone amongst happy revellers. Technically, I found painting all these works easy, but they were emotionally very traumatic.