Seven years separate these two self-portraits. I finished the one on the left (Cubist Self Portrait) earlier this week in a flurry of intersecting vertical and horizontal brush strokes. Twenty minutes of rapid wrist work to complete a painting that sat glumly on my easel for six months, blocking all efforts to move beyond. In those six months I traveled to Barcelona, read both published volumes of John Richardson's biography of Picasso, and studied the blue, rose and cubist periods in detail, not knowing what for. Now I know, dimly: a new direction in portraiture has opened for me. Ghostly, the image glows through, like an X ray, unlike the firm fleshy visage of the younger me in the self-portrait on the right. Have I dematerialized, becoming ectoplasm or phantasm? They say the body completely renews all its cells over a period of seven years. Perhaps they never return with the same self-confident solidity.
