Self Portrait at 4am

Since the clocks changed this Autumn, I’ve been ignoring the rest of the world and living in my own time zone. Time for me is eternally “Summer”. So 4am is only getting up a little early for me.
 

I’m always at my best in the mornings. It’s the time to plug away at something before the necessities of the day intervene. So here I am at my peak. In the dead zone between night and day. In the dead zone between Christmas and New Year.  I did a rough pencil drawing in the morning of December 29th that I thought looked promising. Next day I did a brush and ink version based on that. I then prepared a block and traced the image on to the block and inked it. But I wasn’t happy with it so I wiped it off. Next morning I stood back in front of the mirror. And using the ghost of the ink and carbon as the structure, I looked into the mirror for the highest highlights and cut them into the block. Being early morning in winter, I am entirely artificially lit by the LED spotlights in the kitchen. It’s a stark look.
 

Pretty much all the work was done in the hours between 4am and 8am over those 3 days.
 

I felt I needed a self portrait to face 2021. Last year was a year of growth and development for me. At Rugby Open 2019 I felt I needed a “body of work”, and I arbitrarily decided that that meant I needed around 35 images to my name. That’s pretty much what I did during 2020, and I’m really happy with how they all went. Last January I did a little self portrait using nasty dried-out old lino. So this one asks, “After all that, where am I now?”