Self-Portrait

Manon Cleary is remembered for her prolific output of painstakingly photo-realistic paintings and drawings addressing themes of the human body and sexuality, including her own. In this large graphite self-portrait, Cleary leveraged graphite’s potential to emulate a black and white photograph. Degrees of distortion, such as the blur of the artist’s moving hair, are effects frequently observed in photographs. Rather than an image captured by a camera in a fraction of a second, however, Cleary’s self-portrait is an intensely introspective work, meticulously developed inch by inch over countless hours.