Self Portrait in a Black Shirt, 2024, oil on canvas, 51 x 40.75 cm
This is my latest self portrait which was painted over a number of sittings throughout 2023 and completed early this year. I think it's finished but so often I've got my paintings documented as finished paintings and then I fiddle with them a little more and have to get them photographed again. This portrait was documented a second time because the background was a little too blank and appeared to be static so I added more subtle coloured greenish tones. Hopefully the background has a sufficient, but still subtle, variation to make it interesting and not distract from the face.
One of the trickiest things about portrait painting is that the human face is not symmetrical so to create a balanced face from asymmetrical parts is a difficult problem. Not many people give this much thought, and why should they anyway, but people are often surprised to learn that one eye is higher than the other. One eyebrow is higher than the other. One eye is more rounded than the other eye which is more egg shaped. One nostril is higher than the other, one side of the mouth is higher than the other. One side of the mouth is wider than the other. One side of the face is wider than the other, and etc.
The fashion industry knows this truth but it thinks symmetry is the more beautiful, so fashion photographers slice a face vertically and then copy and paste one side as a mirror image of itself to create a perfectly symmetrical human being. Sounds just like the salon painters of the later part of the 19th Century who thought the ideal more beautiful than reality!
