Self Portrait, 15th January 2006

18th January 2006

Last night I had the worst nightmare of my entire life. It knocked me for six, and it's still skulking around in the corners of my brain today, I can't seem to shake it off.

Bear with me, this will relate back to drawing eventually...

I'm not going to go into details, but it's a ghost I thought I'd buried a very long time ago. Obviously I haven't. But I'm pretty sure that starting to draw and paint again has dredged it back up from the depths of my subconscious somehow. It has to do with a kind of ambivalence I've always felt about whether I was going to be a full time artist all my life or not.

Now, at forty, I've realised that painting is all I've ever really wanted to do, but I allowed outside (as in outside me) influences to dissuade me from it, or at least to make me question whether painting was going to my full time profession.

Last night's nightmare really shook me up, but it also came with a small revelation. I now think that I was entirely wrong in my background page about my reasons for giving up painting. Those things may have had an influence but are by no means the whole story, or even a significant part of it. I think the real reason runs much deeper. It too personal for me to talk about here, it would'nt be very interesting to any one else and is beside the point anyway, but realising what it is has changed the way I think about what I'm doing here.

When I decided that I was going start working again, I made a conscious decision that I didn't want to get wrapped up the esoteric side of art with a capital 'A'. I hoped to avoid all those difficult issues that ensnared me in the past by concentrating purely on the craft side of painting, the technical aspects of producing good work, with the aim of getting back to making a living from painting again. Now I think that was slightly foolish, like learning to cook nice tasting food without worrying about whether it's good for you, whether you can survive on it or not. Or something like that.

But that's the funny thing about art, (I'll take mine with a small 'a', thanks). It has a way of bringing out things which you never intended to be brought out at all. The other day I bought a book by Isaac Asimov (a book I'd never heard of before called 'Magic') at the local library crap-books-no-one-ever-takes-out sale. I opened it at a random page and started reading. This quote jumped right off the page at me:

"...I don't like to try to guess the thoughts and motivations in the author's mind. I know, from personal experience, that clever analysts can find a great deal more in a novel than the author ever realized he put in. (Yes, I have been victimised in this fashion, but I also know that despite my vehement denials that I meant this or that - I cannot entirely account for the unconscious mind.)"

That quote came back to me at about 5am this morning when I was lying awake thinking about my nightmare. I find it slightly disconcerting how down in the mouth or downright angry I look in my self portraits. A few people I've shown this site to have remarked on it. Michelle says she doesn't think they look that much like me because that's not the me she sees. I look happier than that in every day life (she says). Up to now I've been dismissing it by saying that it's my concentrating face, and I really thought that was true. But now I'm wondering if there isn't something coming through there, the same thing that gave me my terrible nightmare. It's all linked up with doubt over my abilities, doubt whether I'll ever be good enough to make it as a painter.

In my rational mind I know that's rubbish. I've sold work before, I've lived off painting before, pretty well too, and if that isn't a definition of 'making it' I don't know what is. But it doesn't matter how much I rationalise it, those doubts just won't go away. I can see them as clearly as you like in this drawing, probably because I know exactly what frame of mind I was in when I drew it. Michelle still refers to it as the 'sad drawing' though, so I guess it comes across.

Which brings me back to Asimov's quote above. I didn't set out to do a sad drawing because I was in a bad mood that day. I've been trying to eliminate anything like that and to draw exactly what I see, that's what this site is supposed to be all about. But it does seem I'm on a hiding to nothing with that. As rational and pragmatic as I'd like to think I am, something of me is going to come out in everything I do, especially in self portraits. Maybe the drawings would be pretty worthless if that side of it wasn't there.

At the end of the day, I think that could be what makes this ride so interesting, and so frightening at the same time. I'm being forced to deal with things I thought I'd locked away for good, and if I won't deal with it when I'm awake it's going to make it's presence felt in bad dreams, or in my drawings. We all have our personal demons. In order to make life manageable we keep it below the surface where it won't affect our day to day functioning, but it's there nonetheless I'm sure.

Michelle says she thinks I'm brave putting all my thoughts live on this site for visitors to read, the two or three visitors I get anyway. But if this site and this project to learn painting again is going to work out, I need to be honest with myself. It will come out anyway, so I may as well put it all down here, (apart from the odd secret we all have to keep to stay sane and functional.)

So back to the drawing. This self portrait was done before the nightmare, and doesn't relate to it apart from it being the most recent drawing I've done and the closest to last night's nightmare in time. Also it's the first one I've done in which I don't look completely unhappy, so maybe my unconscious is down there slowly working things out for me. Who knows.