Self-portrait
Oil on board and linoleum (in 15 sections), 25.4 x 21.6 cm, 1977
NPG (18)

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Self-portrait
89, Acrylic on board cm, 1987
NPG (89)

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Self-portrait
Ink and wash, 11.4 x 8.9 cm, 1975
NPG (15)

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Since I was a student I have done no substantial self-portrait. The various small paintings and drawings and prints of myself that I have done have usually been the result of requests for posters etc. The one I find most satisfying was first shown in an exhibition called Together Again which was a reunion show at the South London Art Gallery (London's most scandalously wasted exhibition space) in 1981, of the 'class of '61' from Camberwell School of Art. I had been making a very small oil self-portrait that turned into a multiple image of my head. I was suffering from slight constipation at the time and spent longer than usual periods in the lavatory staring at cracks in the wall and incidents in the rather hideous and hitherto barely noticed linoleum, which, using various vomity hues, was made up of tiny abstract squares of various shapes repeated at intervals. One of these began to fascinate me and I sought in my enforced leisure its fellows wherever they occurred on the floor: it reminded me insistently of a figure holding a camera to his eye in the act of taking a photograph. Being cheap lino (in a room so bare and awful it was featured in Peter Greenaway's film '26 Bathrooms' as the 'Samuel Beckett Memorial Bathroom') the printing was not consistent and the registration slipped from image to image. I cut out all the examples I could discover and put them to one side thinking to find some use for them later on. These missing sections led to a disastrous toe-stubbing effect in the lino so I had to resurface the whole room. I cannot remember why or how I thought of the conjunction of these fragments and the self-portrait yet when I did bring them together, I found that there was exactly the right number to surround the little self-portrait. My assistant made up a frame to house them and they looked as if the picture had been planned that way from the first.  > >

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