226. Self portrait

226. Self portrait, 2025, Öl auf Leinwand, 40 x 30cm, (Darryn Ansted)

I never imagined I would paint another self-portrait. I painted a self-portrait at age 17 and then again at around age 20. Now I am 45. The impulse is the same but there was nothing in the early attempts. There was no familiarity with the other side of the canvas, with those who look at painting and those who do painting. They were just bursts of youth and enthusiasm as is often the case at the outset of adulthood, like a howl into the noise of concert loudspeakers in the dark of night, a declaration that I am alive and little more. Sure, it is a wonderful way to start something but not very interesting, not engaging, not a dialogue. I tried to throw those early self-portraits away but my mother took them out of the bin without telling me, and held on to them. I still would not include them in my list of serious work (which I only started at age 28) but it is probably good that they are still around somewhere. Today, the things I paint must survive many mature doubts. I often ask myself: Is this anything? Is this empty? How can this manifest something I can’t yet imagine and therefore show me something I do not yet understand? How can it thereby do some actual work? How do I make all the parts form into a whole? How does it engage with precedents set by others?

The current project I am working on is called Situations. On a simple level, every painting is the result of a situation I experienced. In this case, a mirror had arrived from Ikea and I tried to mount it on the wall while my wife, who ordered the mirror, was out. When I opened the package, I saw that the mirror was broken. It had a big crack across the middle. I photographed it to send to Karin and explain what happened. When I looked at the photo that I had taken I saw these two legs in the picture. I was so thrown to discover these peculiar legs in the broken mirror.

These paintings all come from different situations I recently experienced but moreover they come from the critical development of a situation of painting. Without this development they are just random pictures and could just as easily be photographs. For example, seeing the Portrait of Pablo de Valladolid (1635) by Diego Velázquez in the Prado a few years ago perhaps created the possibility of my now seeing the reflection of my legs here as having potential as a self portrait, as having being that could be autonomous within a painting, even beyond me. Pablo or "Pablillos" de Valladolid was a jester at Philip IV's court. These legs were so similar to his stance. Now that it is a painted image, I can also see that one foot is in the present and one foot is in the past. That is definitely however a portrait very much of me. That is something I feel more than something I can vividly see, and I appreciate the painting for providing an image to that feeling.

Humans crave to see themselves from the outside but we never really can. Adolph Menzel’s painting of his own foot reflects this interiority and its relationship with embodiment. We can only know the world from our person. Even mirrors give us a laterally reversed view of ourselves. Perhaps that is what provokes their effect of defamiliarization. This moment of seeing my legs did not prompt the existential crisis we read about in Jean Paul Sartre’s discussion of that phenomenon however. It was much simpler. I just thought the legs looked like they were involved in something, running ahead of me. As for the clothes, I have always avoided wearing tracksuit pants because I always felt like they had a strong junkie vibe. And yet, 9 times out of 10 these days I look down and see tracksuit pants. I’m not quite sure how that happened. Who is this court jester?

I am still reading Knausgaard’s autobiography, or rather, listening to it, and I am nearing the end. The feeling I get is that a friend (Geir) recommended the title to Knausgaard of ‘my struggle’ as a joke and not only did he take it seriously, but at the end of the book he goes down the bleak rabbit hole of extensively psychoanalyzing Hitler. So, at the end of this enormous 6 volume book this morbid discussion forms a large final digression in the text. 3000 pages prior Knausgaard told of how his own father twisted his ear to inflict violent punishment on the boy. I felt at first a little bit like my ear was being twisted as the audio book now dragged me through this fine-grained analysis of history’s worst person. (The mention of his failure to get into the art academy and attempt to live by selling paintings also figured prominently. Knausgaard wonders if art is an escape from life, an avoidance of a meaningful engagement. That is not really true though, is it? Life is an escape from life. Art is life that does not escape from itself, at least in a book like this. Art is the bare life, kneaded with hands and proceeding through incremental conscious acts.

Nonetheless, I wouldn’t want that to detract from my otherwise overall glowing review of this great autobiography. I just return to my previous sentiment that he really would have benefitted from an editor excising a chunk here and there. However, I also say that because I studied German history at length during the production of my PhD. So, I don’t think I can listen to it being redone from the perspective of a typical reader. When you study these things intensively, as Knausgaard also mentions, they can really make you feel quite physically ill. How can people be so terrible to one another, you wonder. And, therefore also, in spite of its abrasive whorl in the grain of the text I concede this digression is actually delicately expounded by Knausgaard. I am so often scratching my head as I read about the trends in politics around the world. I really want to avoid a discussion of civilization and its discontents. Unfortunately, rage, fear and hate haven’t subsided in human civilization.

Circumscribing life through the artwork of the novelist and auteur seems to be in decline these days. I met a young girl in Melbourne around 10 years ago, who, when I asked what she vividly knew of the 20th century, told me that it was like ‘ancient Greece’ to her and her generation. This made my head spin. Reading Knausgaard’s discussion of Stefan Zweig’s discussion of 19th Century Vienna however gave me also a sensation of the passage of time from one century into a yet more impoverished one. The intentional acts of the human mind come into conflict with yet another required software update. What an embarrassment of riches, a moment when you need to look at your own two feet, and although seeing one in the past and one in the future, hope that they are poised to coordinate at least some physical activity.

#self-portrait, #mirror, #lindbyn, #Velázquez, #Prado, #jester, #Menzel, #defamiliarization, #Sartre, #tracksuit, #Knausgaard, #civilization, #Zweig, #Freud