“It isn’t an easy job to paint oneself—at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph.”
-Vincent van Gogh
Emotional transparency is overrated. It requires no thought—only reaction. No interpretive labor necessary—just raw data delivery. Honesty involves something more.
Energy. It takes effort to accurately interpret our inner/outer worlds. I spend a lot of energy trying to be honest… in and out of the studio. Funny, though, I think it takes even more energy to lie… which leaves me wondering whether all my attempts at honesty are sometimes just cover for something else. Perhaps, I’m just having a difficult time discerning the difference between the wisdom it takes to transcend foolish transparency and the sad work demanded by hiding from the truth.
Maybe I should just tell you why I painted a self-portrait.
I was running out of time. I needed ready subject matter, and I value endeavors that maximize available resources. I found a half-used, totally abandoned 18” x 24” panel that needed a bit of repair… and a large mirror hiding in storage. Burnt sienna was paint I had to use up (before it went bad), and so, onto the palette it went. Even as I followed these motivations into the immediate labors of oil painting, I knew, deep down, that there were other forces at work beneath. Those would be trickier to excavate, as the task of interpreting my own likeness, I knew, could ask more of me than I had the wherewithal to wrangle in December… all the while suspecting I might see more in that mirror than just graying hair and glasses, more yet from the marks that would make it onto a wood panel.
In the end, I saw in my own face, a man who’s been searching for [honest] words… words which are not ready yet (they’re too guttural at this point), but are driven by a longing for an impossible accuracy, for wholesale wholeness, for some justice, and against odds, for the kind of love that wins.
Honestly.
