Painting your own image

Ben Smith's self-portrait

11 April 2012

I've been working on a masterpiece for Channel 4's Self Portrait UK project. It is, after all, open to everyone - even critics and curators. The opportunity for a spot of self-scrutiny is too good to miss, particularly as the initiative will yield an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in April, and will tour Britain well into next year, with some of the best work featured on billboards and on the project's website.

Truth be told, I have no talent for drawing or making a likeness in any medium. But that might be just the point. While history is full of famous and profound self-portraits, from a Rembrandt young and old to a hard-core porn Jeff Koons, the self-portrait is possibly the most democratic, accessible and universal genre of all.

It's quite different from a portrait, where you might recognise the sitter, but he or she is always presented via the artist. Holbein's portraits are a familiar example: while functioning as works of court patronage, they also contain a personalised impression of what the painter sees, hidden in elements such as the famous distorted skull in the foreground of The Ambassadors.

The relationship between artist and subject can be inscrutable. Mutterings of disapproval are almost a national institution when a new portrait of the Queen is unveiled, for example.

Our greatest living portraitist, Lucian Freud, had a crack at it in 2001. Even he received short shrift, prompting one commentator to suggested the painter ought to be "locked in the Tower" for his efforts. It never seems to look the way we'd want or expect her to look.

The nature of the self-portrait shrinks the gap between artist and subject. It is, at best, unflattering and unflinching. Lucian Freud's self-portraits betray a hard-edged, uncompromising gaze. His most recent endeavour, displayed still wet from his studio at the Tate Britain retrospective last year, disclosed the anxiety of an ageing man grasping at the fading vigour of his youth.

Any good self-portrait strives to come close to the truth of self-perception. For the viewer there's apparently nothing to doubt in this ultimate act of witnessing.

Self Portrait UK will set out to prove the openness and expediency of the genre. It has established dozens of outreach programmes and educational initiatives that are particularly geared towards people often excluded from, or invisible in, society - from prisoners and young offenders to asylum seekers.

There are also school children and celebrities - a serene Jenny Agutter photographed in the Australian outback and an expressionist Jon Snow - who will submit work.

Other workshops will look at stereotypes and under-represented social groupings, such as older people, who can bring along a photograph from the family album and make new images by way of comparison. And if you are struggling with your own technique, the NPG is even running a series of one-day workshops from next week,equipped with mirrors and Polaroids.

I'm certainly struggling with my technique. I've had a standard selfportrait caricature that I've been turning out for a good 20 years -

suitable for notes to lovers and milkmen. Now I come to look at it again, I realise that it was based on a projection of how I imagined the state of my personal degeneration perhaps 20 years on.

Now I've reached the projected age, I think my image is in need of a make-over: the smiley face, round ears and eyes and, crucially, two tufts of hair protruding wildly from above the ears, like Bobby Charlton going for a header on a windy day, looks nothing like me. The smile is more of a grimace these days, and the bald patch - which I must have been anticipating in some Oedipal affiliation to my dad - thankfully has yet to materialise.

But the self-portraits of lasting value grapple with a resolute obligation to realism, rather than caricature. My favourites are by the French-born conceptualist Roman Opalka, who, in tandem with his selfportraits has, since 1965, been producing paintings that consist only of row after row of tiny numbers on the canvas. He began at one and he continues counting on a new canvas, beginning with the number he ended his last work on, reaching by now well past the five million mark. It's a long-term project that will not be complete until the day he dies.

He has also been working on his self-portraits for 30-odd years: at the end of each working day he takes a headandshoulders photograph of himself. Of course, they all look unsurprisingly similar on the surface. He has aged remarkably little, he wears the same white shirt, and the face has the same quizzical expression today as it did in 1965. I observe a barely perceptible deepening of wisdom in the eyes, but I'm not sure that much of this isn't what I want to read into the image; even when I compare one day to the next,

I'm convinced I can see the toll of the previous 24 hours in his face. The scale of Opalka's project bears testimony to the notion of the selfportrait as necessarily incomplete - there are always more experiences to capture.

I love the thinking behind Self Portrait UK, but I believe that the organisers should develop it further. I'd like to see the initiative as something of a national census. It's not an analysis of what we own or what we do, but of how we see ourselves. So I would urge the organisers towards one imperative: don't be selective.

The opportunities here for a collective, complex, multifaceted artwork that depicts the national identity are enormous. There's a singular truth to be told. If that means stacking the images 20-high in the NPG, and round-the-clock video screenings, so be it.

The chaos would be worthwhile, to have a glimpse of just whom do we think we are.

For more information visit: www.channel4.com/selfportraituk

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