Narcissism, self-loathing and the paradox it presents – the first in a trilogy

Dear Void, you faceless, no-account wastrels, it’s time to cut to the vice.

I can’t paint good but I always wanted to paint portraits.  Here’s the thing: People find out that I paint for a hobby and their first question is, ‘ORLY what do you paint?’.  Well if you’ve seen any of the other pages in this cess pit, you’ll understand how difficult it is to answer that question. 

I decided to be a portrait artist simply to make that question go away.  The problem was that I had then even less artistic ability than I do now (or did, until recently. Now I’m back where I started, with little possibility of recovery). So I couldn’t very well ask people to let me practise on them; there was pride and integrity on the line (both false, I assure you).

If I do your portrait, you will respond in one of two ways:

A)     You’ll shout at me in a hurt tone, ‘That’s how you see me?! You’re a cunt, Soc!’
B)      You’ll shout at me derisively, ‘That’s what you call a portrait?! You’re a cunt, Soc!’

We both lose either way, so I never do it.  Well, almost never.  I have one subject who calls me a cunt on a regular basis, both in hurt and derision by turns. My subject is Soc.

I kicked off when I was about eighteen, completely confused about how paint works, and utterly untrained (heh, apart from my age, these conditions persist to this day).  This nascent effort was more than a little delusional.  And laughably twee:

As will be evident by the time this is done, I’ve never liked my hair, so this is a complete fabrication. I’m still a skinny fuck though.

Next up, a few years later, the second attempt.  This Soc is about to marry Frankenspouse:

While still woefully amateur, it’s not a bad representation (as best I can remember) of me at the time.  The square-on angle a) clearly reveals that I used a mirror and b) obscures the monolithic protuberance that is my nose (while at the same time accentuating my sticky-outy ears).  But check out that head of hair!  I wonder if it really looked like that!  I’m skull-bald now.  But I remember that shirt.

In later years, I got a bit more figurative:

Now we’re getting introspective! Yes we’re copping to the big nose and the sticky-outy ears, but what’s this? No chin?! That’s why forty-year-old Soc wears a beard.

I was approaching my late twenties and had a penchant for the stuffed-shirt, three piece suit look.  I never did it in the real world because I’m a bum.
And the hair’s gone! Portentous...

Soc is a fraud

downinahole