Here I am, in the middle seat, facing out.
I put this off for three weeks. A self-portrait in a series about being processed invites a reading I did not want, which is the artist as victim, the sensitive man crushed by the counter. That is not what is happening in this picture and I have composed it carefully to make sure.
The pose is frontal and symmetrical and my hands are flat on my knees. That is not a slumped posture. It is the posture of somebody being formally received, and I have borrowed it deliberately from every enthroned figure in the tradition, because the joke, if there is one, is structural. The composition says a person of importance is seated at the centre of this room and is about to be attended to. Everything else in the painting says otherwise. The wall behind me is running with damp. The seat is dished vinyl. The tube overhead gives me a hard flat top light that no portraitist would choose and no sitter would accept.
I am looking straight at you and I would ask you not to read too much into my face. It is not appealing to anyone. It is the face of a man at the third hour who has decided to see this through.
There are seven empty seats around me. I chose the middle one on purpose the day I sat down, before I knew there would be a painting, because a man alone in a room of eight chairs who sits at one end is making a statement about deference and a man who sits in the middle is making a different one. I would like the record to show that I took the centre of the room.
The coveralls are the ones I still wear to work. They are not a costume and I did not clean them for this. There is paint on them now as well as everything else, which is a fair summary of the last few years.
This is the last panel with a person in it. Everything from here is the room by itself, and the room, I promise you, is more interesting without me sitting in the way.