“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.