It started as a practical situation—I needed a model, and I turned, for the sake of economy, to my own reflected image. What I discovered in the self-portrait has become the most important aspect of my work. It is the means by which I can access the personal within the archetypal narrative. The self-portrait places restrictions on the variety of poses, as does the “portrait” genre in general, but these seeming limitations open up a psychological realm that is interesting to me, so I consent to work within them. The portrait—indeed the self-portrait—seems to hold untapped potential for investigating the contemporary psyche, the representation of the self, and the collision of outer and inner worlds. In a painted self-portrait, I can raise questions of vision, viewpoint, artifice, reality, subject and object, viewer and beholder, creator and creation, interior and exterior, illusion and surface: questions that seem inherent to the medium.