Altered States: Exploring the self-portrait

Sun 16 Jul 2023

The artists included in the theme ‘Altered states’ scrutinise the variability of the self-image, whether through masking or distortion.

James Gleeson

Among Australia’s most prominent surrealists, James Gleeson (1915-2008) himself wrote about this self-portrait:

Above the head a hand holds a ‘blood line’ which links all the elements in the painting. Someone has suggested it represents the hand of God. My own feeling is that it is a symbol of my father who died in the Spanish Flu pandemic early in 1919, when I was barely three years old. I have no recollection of him at all, though from a surviving drawing he did in his teens (dated 1897) without art training of any kind, I seem to detect a talent that was never allowed to develop. The figure in the bridal gown was adapted from a photograph of my mother, and at the end of the ‘blood line’ the little boy looking at the sky and holding a balloon / moon / sun / world is of course an early me, wondering what lies ahead.

Brett Whiteley

From the mid-1960s, many of Brett Whiteley’s (1939-92) portraits can be seen not so much as optical studies as explorations of the psyche — whether his own or that of others with whom he identified. His self-portraits often include fractured, distorted heads implying the creation of another self or multiple identities, as in Self portrait – showing seven incarnations. This interest was fuelled by Whiteley’s reading of the esteemed British psychiatrist RD Laing’s book The divided self (1960), in which Laing proposed that insecurity about self-existence elicited a defensive reaction in which the ego might split into separate parts, generating classic psychotic symptoms.The painting may also reference Whiteley’s fascination with eastern philosophies and ‘reincarnation’, which was of particular interest to the generation who lived through countercultural movements of the 1960s. In 1966, Brett and Wendy Whiteley travelled by ship from Australia to the United Kingdom, with a stopover in Calcutta. The staggering social and cultural contrasts between Australia and India had a profound effect on the artist.

Dale Frank

Imposing in scale, Dale Frank’s self-portrait is an exploration of the interior self and the relationship between the unconscious and conscious mind. Exemplifying the immediacy of large gestural mark-making, the obsessively rich maze of lines can be seen as a metaphor for the artist’s complex and multi-layered personality. Expanding and contracting like magnetic fields, the contours bear evidence of a struggle to give shape to the search for self-knowledge. Like James Gleeson’s Structural emblems of a friend (self portrait) from 1941 (illustrated) Frank employs common elements of the Surrealist’s vocabulary: the repeated eye motif, biomorphic shapes and an almost automatic dream-like rendering of the image.