Self-Portrait - detail
Notes:
In 2001 Dan Hays in Colorado decided to email a photograph of himself to me. I was certainly curious about how he looked, and felt uneasy that he might look just like me, except wearing a baseball cap and chewing gum. This inevitably turned out not to be the case, and the photo remained in my inbox for several years before I revisited it. I had been working for the best part of a year on two 'mirrored' works, painted in tandem, Colorado Impression 10a & 10b, so became intrigued by the fact that Dan had photographed himself in a mirror, meaning that he was seen the wrong way round. Painting two versions in tandem seemed the logical way forward: Self-Portrait being based on the original image, and Dan Hays its mirror, as if we are behind the mirror, looking in. A further intervention was to crop the original, making the camera dead-centre.
Our mirror image always appears exctly half size to us. This can be simply verified by making marks on a mirror and measuring the distances, yet it still comes as some surprise that this is the case. Our psychological self-importance over-rides perceptual fact. When I tested reproducing the portrait so that Dan appeared half size it just appeared way too small, not like a mirror image. With the camera now the dominant central figure - the link between the two works - it made sense conceptually and perceptually to make it approximately life-size.
The two paintings have been exhibited in different formations - exactly opposite each other, in seperate rooms and side by side, which is how they shall remain:
Dan Hays/Self-Portrait
2005, oil on canvas, 76 x 203cm