Interoceptual portraits

I have been taking the work on interoception into another area, that of portraiture. I have for many years been fascinated by Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' a late nineteenth century Gothic novel, whereby the deeds perpetrated by an evil man, are reflected in the changes made to the features of a hidden portrait, rather than to the face of the man who perpetrated the deeds. At that time there was much interest in physiognomy, the art of judging character from facial characteristics and in response to this, Wilde developed an idea based on a sort of reverse engineering, whereby you can measure the depth of depravity that someone is sinking into by watching their face transform over the years. If only this were true. I can still remember the first time I saw the Ivan Albright painting he made for the film 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. In the 1945 Albert Lewin directed film, the first part had included two colour inserts of a painting made of the youthful handsome Dorian Gray (in reality painted by Henrique Medina) and then later in the film you had two frightening technicolour reveals of Albright's degenerate image of what in reality Gray had become.  Albright's painting would haunt me from then on. 

Dorian Gray by Henrique Medina 1944

Ivan Albright Picture of Dorian Gray: 1944

I thought I saw glimpses of Albright's insight into the human condition in Francis Bacon's work and I was reminded of this when an artist I had been working with in conjunction with an Italian artist to develop ideas for interoceptual portraits, sent me a Simon Shama quote; ‘What Bacon liked about George Dyer was not the assembly of features… what he liked was the inside of him and the way that pressed against the outside, the whole slithery jumble of a person’.

Francis Bacon: Study for a portrait of George Dyer

The phrase, "The whole slithery jumble of a person". struck home, and when it came to my own recent self-portrait, I found myself dealing with disintegrating forms alongside a colour struggle using complementary opposites, both ideas being used to build a psychological idea of an inner duality.

Interoceptual Self portrait

The two artists I have been working with have just sent me some objects through the post, which was a way of getting some sort of physical contact into a situation whereby we have been trying to make images of each other via computer screens. There is something much more authentic about touch and even though we are all three separated by many miles, the few objects that I can hold in the hand and pick up to look at, close those geographical distances right down to the surface of my fingers. Our portraits of each other have been developing over the years. But this time we sent objects and images to act as some sort of catalyst or stimulus to the making. As always these things are as much self-portraits as portraits of others, but the process of an image's arrival is always intriguing. In the case of the image I made responding to the objects in one parcel, I first of all glued down a shirt pattern that was enclosed and then I responded to the same artist's mono-print of a skull. As I was working between several things in the studio, I on purpose didn't think deeply about what I was making, I just kept doing stuff. As Johns put it, "do something and then do something else", or something like that. I.e. keep responding and making things happen and only later go back and see if anything works or not. 

Portrait of myself made whilst thinking of making a portrait of another English artist

Portrait of myself made whilst thinking of making a portrait of an Italian artist 

There is as you can hopefully see in the image above, a strange form emerging from the head of the figure. It is like a shell and has a red rose like form sitting over what would in a more conventional portrait be the brow. It is the product of one of our exchanges, but as always there is very little logic in my image development process. One of the things I was sent from Italy was a small nest like object, it was made of fabric, wrapped in rusty wire and other metal pieces and in its centre was a plaster form, its shape like a pebble brain. My artist corespondent had made a metaphor for her brain. I had sent to her a pair of ceramic legs that I had modelled on an idea of the hut of the Baba Yaga, which is always in illustrated books depicted as a hut carried on giant chicken legs. Without the legs the hut would just be a hut, but with them it became something fabulous. I had sent these legs to both my artist collaborators because I wanted them to think about using the legs to make something of their own fabulous, in the old sense of the word, as something magical, mythical or relating to a fable. When I looked at the nest I realised I needed to put it on similar legs, as I did it became alive and it took over my image making process. It had invoked some form of sympathetic magic.

Portraits of an artist's brain as a mythical creature

Part of my research into the raising of awareness of interoceptual feelings has been to look at the work of illustrators who have been working to visualise its importance. A really good example was the illustrative work of Abby VanMuijen and after looking it, I decided that she had already done some excellent work that focused on the core issues involved and decided therefore that I didn't need to retread the same path, but would continue to push for some sort of visual synthesis between my own more idiosyncratic language and the diagrams of emotional range and pain awareness that I had also been looking at. I was particularly interested in the fact that she kept the same image as an underpinning form and changed the colour to fit the emotional movement.

Abby VanMuijen

I therefore decided to try a similar approach; initially taking my interoceptual self portrait and changing the colour palette to see if I could demonstrate an emotional shift, but combining emotions to see if it was possible to communicate that ever morphing sense of life's instability and constant change.

Surprise and disapproval 

Anger and remorse

Acceptance and sadness

Interoceptual self portraits with colour changes suggesting mood swings

The initial image has a much more nuanced colour range, colours push against each other, my experience being that our emotional range shifts and moves in a complex manner. If like Abby VanMuijen I push the colour range into the primaries, emotion changes but it is simplified, therefore I have decided to look at complex mixes. 

Robert Plutchik, the colour wheel of emotions

I'm gradually bringing my ideas together but as always I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, mainly feeling for something rather that following a logical path. I have looked at Robert Plutchik's work for a while now and although I can see all sorts of problems with it, it does open a door for me, so why not I thought step through it? 

See also:

Body auras

Measuring emotions and colour

To Touch is to believe

Portrait as witness and control

What is a portrait?

The Lamed Vavniks

Drawing out from within