Curator Statement

Like most artists over my life I’ve made a number of self-portraits but this I think is probably the most confident and certainly the most simplistic. I made this quite swiftly. It’s quite a large canvas and I didn’t really do any preliminary drawings for it. I prepared a big yellow canvas, I picked up a brush, I very swiftly did one large drawing. I looked at it, I didn’t like it, I threw it away. I picked up the second canvas and I went through the same process again. You have to make this kind of picture with great control in a sense, and great confidence and I hope that that’s what the painting reflected. I was 70 when I made this picture. I’ve got a painting in the National Portrait Gallery, which is also called Me, that I painted when I was 50 and it was at the time when I guess I was reasonably well known and it deals with a number of faces, a number of facets. It’s got a smiling face within, it’s got unhappy parts of it, it’s got the Harbour Bridge in it, it’s got the pressure of being known for certain things and wanting to move on and break away from those things. It’s a kind of Cubist painting, in fact the National Portrait Gallery were kind enough to say it’s the first Cubist picture that they’ve ever had in there. But this picture was the opposite of that, this is the kind of picture that you can make after you know, maybe 50 or 60 years of work. It’s a strong picture and I’m not sure whether I’ll ever do a picture of myself like that again, in fact, the next picture that we’re going to talk about is another self portrait that wasn’t hung in the Archibald Prize that deals with a different kind of me.