Alice Neel: Self portrait 1980
I've written a few papers about drawing age as I have gotten older and have used the writing of them to reflect on how I've used drawing to come to terms with the ageing process but I've not transferred many of the issues to my blog for some reason. I think its a particular duality that interests me, the differences between what we see and what we feel. For instance I sometimes catch an unexpected view of myself in a shop window or mirror and for a moment can find it hard to believe that that old man looking back at me, is in fact myself. My inner feeling is centred on how I can achieve goals and get stuff done, on where I'm going to, what I need to get for tonight's meal or on what my next drawing is going to be about or how my thoughts can be translated into new artworks and at the same time my feelings about aching limbs, constant indigestion and a fluttering heart continue. All very active stuff that seems to be still partly associated with an active me, a 'young' me; someone that gets stuff done. But then I'm reminded by my reflection that I don't have the energy levels I once had, that physically I now find large drawings very difficult to do, it's hard to get up and down off my knees and I easily go down with infections or suffer from aching limbs. When I read complex texts I now tend to find myself asleep, suddenly nodding off as my mind begins to drift. When writing papers the necessity to accurately use in-text citations, doesn't seem so important any more, in fact it simply begins to annoy me and I see it as an example of academic hegemony.
1000-piece Jigsaw: Frida Kahlo Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
Someone asked me the other day if I would like a jigsaw for my birthday. I cant think of many things that I don't like more than doing jigsaws. I suspect that if Frida Kahlo was still alive she would have really liked to have done something with one of these 1,000 piece jigsaws of her portrait, perhaps she would half finish it and then sign it and have it framed as a joke or more likely she would contact the person responsible for having it made and make them eat it, piece by piece. The original was painted ten years before I was born and she died when I was three. The first suggested jigsaw for a three year old I found was of dinosaurs, a thirty-five piece 'Jumbo Toddler Floor Jigsaw Puzzle'; the irony was inescapable.
Self portrait at the age of 72
The final self-portraits by Picasso are also images that feel as if they are raw, honest attempts to record what it feels like to be old. All four of the portraits below were made when Picasso was 90 years old. They are I think set out in chronological order. He was still pushing visual languages around, each time seeking that resolution that can only emerge from being sensitive to what the image is telling you as it emerges, each image arriving out of the medium as much as out of the artist, visual stories that were dictated by decisions made in the early part of their making. You can see Picasso beginning with a visual language he has used before, but although it makes a good image, it doesn't quite get there in terms of confronting the reality of age. It speaks of experience, but not the moment being inhabited.
June 28th 1972
July 2nd 1972
Picasso: Self portrait facing death: Done over several months 1972
Picasso's final self portrait is strangely more confident. It is as if he is now ready to go. His shoulders remain the same boney ones , but his head is much more firmly attached, he is confident in his use of a language that is much more about the depiction of mass and weight. He still uses the either or flicker of cubist space and his ability to get a head to look at you and yet suggest it is also looking sideways but the tonal control that gives solidity to the form as a whole, over rides the cubist idea. I suspect that he thinks this is funny. He spends a lifetime developing a new language, one that was often cited as bringing art into the twentieth century and echoing the findings of science about the flickering nature of underlying reality. His last self-portrait though relies on the power of chiaroscuro to give conviction, as if he is suggesting that some things will always be. His final image turning himself into a rock, before his actual body turns back into the inert materials it was made from.
Picasso: Self portrait 1972 July 3rd 1972
Joseph Stella: Self portrait on paper: 1940
Joseph Stella was 63 when he draw the self-portrait above, in it he used a combination of graphite pencil, metal-point and both transparent and opaque watercolour, I feel as if it is another of those honest responses to what it is to be alive. He died in his late sixties, so in relation to his life span, this image was made when he was old. I find it fascinating, it feels as if his face is pressed into the paper. He has a very solid, massive head and yet it is flattened by his approach, life seems to be being squeezed out of it, but at the same time he stares back at us very knowingly, almost I feel like a genie that is escaping out of the bottle. He is perhaps escaping his representation, turning back into the monster that he is as a human being. He was apparently a volatile, truculent personality, and I do feel that this image would snap back at you if it could. Like Picasso, Stella's work is associated with modernism and yet when he needs to reflect on his own image, he returns to an academic way of working.
In my published article 'Drawing Age' I wrote that "an ageing body and its memories are simply a conglomerate of materials moving from one state to another and that drawing materials can be thought of as operating in parallel to this." I wanted to communicate the ‘self-feeling’ of ageing in order to develop a personal understanding of how my own thought about it could be taken ‘into’ the thought of another and I also wanted to show how a visual conversation could enter the mind of others as a material entanglement. Looking back on what I wrote I'm already questioning whether or not I was able to do this, but it still seems a worthwhile thing to be occupying myself with.
Interoceptual self portrait 2025
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