A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Madman Painting

A friend of mine was working on a series of black and white photographs when he knocked on the door of my studio. He asked if I would be interested in posing for him; the remit for the shot was to growl at the camera with the wild yawp I sometimes assume in a rage of creativity. The resulting photograph depicts me with veins pulsating out of my neck as my eyes stare like a madman into the lens of the camera. Taking this image I tried to express how I saw myself and worked an image onto canvas. I hope the audience recognises the glorious struggle that ensues when creating a painting; this life of pictures is an immense path of great highs and lows, whoops of victory combined with bellows of frustration; I hope this image encapsulates some sense of that. A man on the edge, always pushing the edge, in a desperate effort to glimpse what is on the other side.