Recalibrating…

There are certain things in painting that only become obvious after you've done them enough times.

Over the past few years, I've started to notice a pattern in my practice. Somewhere in the middle of making a body of work, I find myself returning to a self-portrait.

I never consciously decide to do it. It just seems to happen.

After spending weeks looking outwards, painting other people, absorbing other faces and other emotional worlds, I eventually turn the painting back on myself.

For a long time I thought these self-portraits were simply pauses between larger projects. Looking back, I don't think that's true.

They've become a way of recalibrating.

It's not about checking whether my likeness has changed. It's about discovering whether my way of seeing has.

Cheek to Cheek (Self-Portrait) emerged after Totems and Inner Worlds, two bodies of work that explored psychological space through other people. Returning to my own face wasn't a retreat from those ideas. It was a continuation of them.

In many ways, this painting feels like the next sentence in the same conversation.

When I compare it to Drift, the self-portrait I painted in 2025, I can see a shift. Not just in the handling of paint or the composition, but in the questions the work is asking.

Perhaps that's the real purpose these self-portraits serve.

They aren't milestones.

They're measurements.

Not of who I am, but of who I've become through painting.

Cheek to Cheek (Self-Portrait), 2026
Oil on unstretched canvas
90 × 120 cm
Part of Inner States