The Day I Heard that Mark Hollis had Died (Self-Portrait), National Gallery of Ireland.
To do a self-portrait well, one has to get past the layers of perceptual bias one has built up over an entire lifetime in association with his own face.
The mind uses these bias filters to protect itself from the sheer wattage of untempered reality. To get things done, we replace reality with a functional caricature that has the buttons and lenses we need to articulate ourselves over the landscape of life.
But to depict one’s own face with visual accuracy, a subject which is deeply meaningful and encountered daily — hence deeply covered in layers of this bias filtering — one has to see through all that to the raw sensory data. This means giving up the stabilizing influence of the perceptual structure one has used to cushion reality.
So, at least for self portraits done in a mirror, the resulting portrait shows the subject in a particularly vulnerable state.
If he did this in a mirror, then the image shows him in a state of zenlike presence, in a state of surrender to his senses.
Are you an artist? I don’t know many artists with your perspective, but I don’t want to say artists never have this perspective.
As someone with higher education in studio arts, I can’t speak for all artists. But I can say, in my experience, the cognitive skills that allow an artist to break a subject down into base, renderable components aren’t particularly burdened by familiarity. Like, I don’t think it’s harder to realistically paint my face, or my spouse’s face, etc. than it is to paint anyone else’s face. Part of that is just that it’s generally hard to render faces realistically without adding stylistic choices or bridging over the tricky parts, whether the face is familiar or not. Again, just my experience.
I also don’t think realism or “visually accuracy” is necessary for a good self portrait. Sometimes the self portrait is an introspective exercise. Sometimes a self portrait is not representative of our physical self at all, or is fully abstract.
This self portrait is lovely, especially since I feel like (read: don’t know for sure) based on the title that he tried to capture his expressive emotions during a vulnerable moment. It’s raw.
This is an excellent point. I often hear suggested by painters that they should hold a mirror to the work every now and then as it highlights any errors to be corrected.
Wow! This is a masterpiece.
