Why I’m painting myself
My cheeks burnt fiercely hot and I could tell without looking at them that they were bright red. Not a kind of slightly blushed rosy red, but a terribly deep shameful crimson. I could also tell that a heat of this kind of intensity would remain on my skin for the next few hours, until I was safely tucked away at home. Until I had completed the days endurance test and made it to that milestone that was 3o’clock – home time.
Thirty years later and at times my skin still glows hot, but not with such intensity and not usually for such long tedious hours. It’s my favourite time of the day, the morning, when the day is fresh and you get to restart yourself all over again. To begin a new, to shower and feel, at least temporarily, fresh and clean before the dirt of the day begins to creep onto the skin. Where you can begin with such good intensions knowing that it probably won’t last before the tiredness washes over and sinks in again.
Thirty years since I was eight. Tomorrow it will be thirty one, but that’s close enough. Close enough to remember. A rather odd milestone and yet in some ways I don’t really feel any different. Still that awkward, odd child trapped inside a body that was rapidly growing alien to me. The ridicule, the shame. Even after all these years the shame that I can never quite shake off. At times it feels akin to grief. That too follows me everywhere, like silent ghosts whose tendrils of smoke work their way around a room before they gently start to choke you up inside.
I’ve had this mad idea to paint myself, to complete a series of self-portraits which attempt to address those feelings that seem to be branded into my flesh. The feelings that stick like a kind of stubborn dirt, dirt that won’t succumb to washing no matter how hard you scrub. Paintings that might in some way go to convey how these long felt childhood emotions have woven themselves into the relationship I’ve had with myself and my body ever since.
My greatest fear from undertaking such a task is that it will become a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. That it will lead me right back to the beginning – that is to say it will open up the doors to even more shame. That I will indeed just be making an absolute fool of myself, only this time it will actually be entirely my own fault. Back in 1992 there were no smartphones, there wasn’t any internet or things such as YouTube – I couldn’t bear to think of the endless aftermath if there had been. My weekly humiliations forever immortalised for all to see on and endless repeating cycle of shame. It is of course still on loop inside the dark crevices of old yet not faded memories. I sometimes wonder if anyone else from that time, from that room ever remembers it too, remembers witnessing my shame.
Hence why this is probably a terrible idea. Yet it is one that I have pondered upon for a very long time, despite all the doubts and misgivings. Despite everything, I believe that I should attempt to create the work that I feel called to make and that I shouldn’t censor my work, even from myself.
Despite enduring these feelings in the quiet privacy of my own mind for all these years I suspect that I am not in fact alone in this. And so for anyone else out there whose own distorted sense of self has been corrupted by their past I make this work for you as well.
