The Misanthrope

Description

The Misanthrope – Original outsider artwork. Acrylic on canvas painting incorporating newspaper collage. This is a straight-up self-portrait, I started to work on it in 2019, initially, it was a clean portrait depicting just my features. However, I was never quite happy with it, it didn’t seem to reflect me in a way that I could relate to.

So over time, I would change it, destroy it, fling paint at it, scrape it, scratch it, etc. Until slowly it began to become something that more accurately felt like a self-portrait to me. The bones are copied from an X-ray I had of my chest back in 2015 (they rather delightfully let me keep the X-ray slide).

The result is as chaotic as I would expect for something that has come from my mind and represents me to some degree, hence the name ‘The Misanthrope’.

This painting incorporates lots of my favourite techniques, splash painting, scrapes, paint runs, news paper clippings and fish.

The newspaper clippings say: misanthrope, spaghetti, speak only truth, and fabrika şiddeti cezası (factory violence penalty). The fish are painted on newspaper cutouts, although the text is barely readable now.

An  11″ x  14″ (28x35cm) Giclée art print of this artwork is available.