I’ve always used my own body for most of the nudes I paint, this started for purely practical reasons…..but I never dared to paint a self portrait of my own face, that is until last year, and since then I just can’t seem to stop.

More recently I’ve been delving into the realm of double portraits, shifting my focus from trying to capture the essence of an individual, beauty, identity and image to trying to capture moments of duality, interactions and a sense of otherness. So why am I still using myself?

Artists and musicians choose subjects which are of primary concern and importance to them, whether this is love, nature, architecture or politics. I think that painting or making art or music in general is an expression of self – is an attempt, not necessarily conscious to create something which reflects and illustrates our internal landscape. I realized that mine is mainly based on feeling rather than intellectual, practical or physical concerns. I live in a sea of constantly shifting emotions surrounded by a strange sense of mysticism – I’m constantly aware of minute unspoken moments between people, the emotion of which I often find quite overwhelming. I sometimes feel a bit like an emotional sponge. There is a melancholy, a sadness and a yearning for beauty and perfection but not always in a negative sense – often in a quite beautiful one.

I think it is that mixture of overwhelming emotion which I am trying to express through my art – and so it makes sense for me to use my own face and body as a way of doing so, and if that means I am completelyegocentric then I suppose I’ll just have to come to terms with that.

I am used to painting large scale portraits of women, examining their faces, studying the features and coming to grips their the shapes and shadows the face presents. I often play around with images on the computer for hours, staring at the face in front of me trying to familiarise myself with it.

In this case though I am staring at my own face, but I do not need to study the shapes and features as they are all too familiar. It feels very strange and self indulgent to be staring at my own face and to then paint it on a large scale – especially when I step back from it and go to look at it as an image and then am confronted with my own face looking back at me.

At the same time it is quite fascinating how much easier it is to paint my own face because the shapes come naturally. I suppose it is similar to way that as children and often even as adults we find it easier to draw/paint someone of our own sex as the shapes are more familiar and therefore come more naturally to us.

In any case it is quite an experience …