«Lady in the mirror»

Around 1524 Parmigianino painted himself on a small round wooden panel, looking into a convex mirror. His hand swells toward the viewer, his face bends with the glass, and the room curls around him. It is the Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and it is an early picture about how a person looks when they check themselves. Five hundred years later the mirror is a phone, and that is where this glitch portrait begins.

The oldest selfie question, how do I want to be seen, is the starting point of the painting.

A young woman stands in a selfie-like pose, her gaze turned slightly aside. Her skin is built from tiny dots of paint. She wears a checkered dress and a gold-chained bag with a luxury-brand monogram, and a watch sits on her wrist. Behind her shoulder a small profile badge shows a name and a rating, like a label in an app. This is a glitch portrait, so her face does not hold together: a black censor bar sits over one eyebrow, a strip cuts across her mouth and slips sideways, and square colour blocks scatter on the right like broken pixels. Around it all runs a painted ornate gold baroque frame.

Warhol painted the Marilyn Diptych in 1962, repeating a famous face until it fades. Robert Cornelius made a photographic self-portrait in 1839, often called one of the first. I wanted to join the two: a face as a product, and a face you take yourself. The pixel blocks are also a small nod to Mondrian.

I like an old-master kind of frame around a dating-profile kind of face. It is contemporary pop art that does not ask for your approval.

Oil and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 90 cm, 2024, from my collection No Future. This original is still available and ready to ship. Most of my other originals are already in private collections, and I paint new ones to order in any size. There is also a hand-finished lithograph of it, and orders go through Instagram or email.