My first encounter with the Van Dyck self-portrait
was it seemed so unlike any Van Dyck 
I thought I'd seen before.
You feel his presence and yet at the same
time there’s a feeling
also of his remoteness, a kind of distance, a reserve.
He is stretching backwards and upwards to
look into the mirror
and you know that as soon as he returns to painting
he’s going to disappear completely from sight.
I think it’s that momentariness in that
pose, that stretch, that turn
that creates this feeling of precarious presence
and absence of the figure.
I think there is a sadness that purveys this
painting.
It's clear that he was suffering from a terminal
illness.
Whether he was at the moment he painted this
painting is not sure but I think there is
something in that
and I was really amazed when I went to the
National Portrait Gallery
and saw the infrared reflectograph in which
you can see the layers through it.
There was the image of a rather more sickly
and I think slightly anxious figure painted beneath.
The other thing that I find so extraordinary
about the painting
is the way it seems divided in two, almost
across the middle of the oval.
The bottom part is rendered in very free strokes
of paint, impasto strokes,
indicating the active arm, his painting arm,
he’s looking over the shoulder this way,
but the face has got that perfection, 
almost of a photographic image.
You are aware that the body occupies one space
and the head occupies another.
It is a disjunctive, almost schizophrenic,
feeling about the whole thing.
In that way I think he emphasises something
about the nature of metamorphosis:
The way paint becomes face, persona, that
transformation
which is what painting is all about and
portraiture is all about.
Turning does seem to imply metamorphosis as
well.
I wanted to look at that particular gesture
and I wondered where it might have come from.
And of course the very earliest self-portrait
of Van Dyck, the only other self-portrait of Van Dyck
that was just a simple head and shoulders
image
is his very early self-portrait at the age of 14.
There is a feeling of vulnerability in it,
a kind of curiosity
at the beginning of his career of confronting the unknown.
And this is another kind of confrontation
of the unknown.
But it's one in which he seems more self-possessed
but there is equally the same vulnerable glance,
It’s something to do with that occupation
of this in-between space.
And that’s what I wanted to do with the
exhibition which framed this work:
I wanted to gather together work that had
a similar quality for me.
Ones which brought out a feeling of metamorphosis.
My ambition was to create a show in which
I could link the act of physically turning
with turning into – Metamorphosis.
And I focus on some of the mythic associations
with turning.
There’s the Orpheus myth, in which Orpheus is told, having been been granted permission
to enter the underworld and bring Eurydice
out into the light of day,
is told not to turn.
But of course he’s impatient and he does,
he turns and he loses her a second time
into the underworld and death.
And of course we’re very lucky in Birmingham
to have a massive collection of Burne-Jones,
whose favourite theme is the Perseus myth,
which is full of metamorphosis.
Perseus would be turned to stone by directly looking at Medusa,
so he has to use the image, the mirror, the
reflective shield, as a way of defeating her.
Burne-Jones is a painter who is completely
obsessed with metamorphosis.
That's had a very personal meaning to me because
I was brought up in Worcester near Birmingham,
and I think I got the first shiver of the uncanny
in looking at Burne-Jones’ work.
I have been aware in my own work particularly
in the Marriage series,
that I was involved in producing images that
involved a kind of metamorphosis.
And I noticed also that when I did so with
perfect alignment
both of vantage point and in pose of each of the figures
it somehow didn't work. It always seem to
need a slight mis-alignment.
But what I hadn’t been aware of until I
started looking at the Van Dyck
and some of the other artists that I’ve
included in the show
Is that this was also a kind of turning.
It seems like a very small discovery but it’s
rather a significant one.
I realised by looking through a lot of my
Marriage series that I was actually creating
the classic self-portrait pose.
A number of critics and visitors to my show
have made the suggestion
That my Marriage series are all self-portraits.
And I’ve always been mystified by this,
looking at these things and thinking nothing looks
at all like me
and then suddenly I realised that it’s not
that they look like me,
it’s that they look like self-portraits.
