Portrait of the Artist

Some of my closest friends (like Slant or Pat, pictured above) are cousins. More to the point, they are also photographers, writers, or, like Pat, painters.

When I told Pat I wanted to take his portrait he was cautiously agreeable; when he isn't teaching art or parenting he spends as many hours as possible each day in his studio, a little terrace house in Bray Co Wicklow. It's difficult to take a straightforward portrait of Pat because he either looks too serious (like donning a death-mask) or about to explode into laughter. We have a similar sense of humour, a mixture of the wildly surreal and crudely adolescent. We got some of this out of our system by taking some looney shots, like the following.

In the end the shot that proved most effective was one of the first I took, of Pat on his mobile; it helped that he was doing something else. I like that there are two more portraits within this one, one by Pat and the other a reproduction of self-portrait by an old mutual favourite.