As a child, I loved to draw and, luckily, my affinity for it came at an early age. As I grew I learned that my mother also loved to draw and that my aunt — my mother’s only sister — was a professional artist living in Germany. My dad was no slouch with a pencil either.

When I first arrived in the U.K. in 1997, Hanwell Primary School in London, where I attended, had support staff that specialised helping migrant children like me speak the language. This lovely Swedish lady asked me to create a book of the England football team, and with each player came the opportunity for a small pencil portrait.

I’m sure I picked up some much-needed English, but man, did I love those pictures. Golden-haired David Beckham and the fierce-faced Alan Shearer. If only I knew what happened to that thing.

Things got considerably more serious a few years later when, at Victoria College in Jersey, I was introduced to the work of Chuck Close at the outset of Year 8. Tim Ashton-Barnett, my art teacher there, explained how Close used the grid to accurately capture his subjects, even as his art faculties deteriorated with illness and age. Using the technique, I completed my first ever self-portrait with pencil — also lost to the bowels of time — before proceeding to other subjects.

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Afghan boy is the first surviving artwork of mine and is pictured below. It’s completion date is listed in June 2005 — though that’s a conservative guess and it could in fact be earlier.

Baby boy, on the other hand, was definitely completed in May 2006 — the year I took my GCSE’s. For this and other works, I received an A before this portrait went on to sell at a charity auction for £250 the following year. Not bad going for a sixteen year old in my opinion.

As I followed other interests and hobbies, there was a long lapse before I felt the need to create another image. For capturing faces in art — what has always most inspired me — felt more like a necessity than the pursuit of a hobby.

I don’t know what triggered the sudden compulsion to draw again in 2016. Perhaps it was the quite striking stare that Dr Jordan Peterson is capable of giving, hopefully captured in this ink drawing from a speech he was giving. This is the only portrait completed — to date at least — without relying Close’s method of using a grid.

This sparked a prolific period of pencil drawing, starting with this rather angry-looking self-portrait. It was just after a break-up and I didn’t like myself then. I decided to set my shoulders back, take on the challenge and reincarnate. In this period, I not only embraced art, but also literature and writing. Peterson’s Maps of Meaning was quite influential in that period, and remains so to this day.

Then came my return to oil painting in the summer of 2018, starting with Damsels, using an image from the photographer Paolo Pellegrin. Though the end result is a little unrefined — not helped by the fact that I was working on board — the composition and facial expressions of these women always yanks a heart string in me. Hopefully that feeling is reciprocated.

In this self-portrait, I experimented with a painting on a cork board that I had found. While it made for an interesting experience, I’m not sure it’s one I’d repeat. Funnily enough, this image was later altered by my younger sibling who added a thick plume of smoke emerging from my cigarette. I fumed with anger at the time but later appreciated the contribution to the creation.

My next major oil painting came in September 2019, and I again returned to the subject of self-portrait. This time I was on the verge of a break-up and a further torrent of change.

Roy. Roy. Roy. What to say about a painting that was over five years in the making. Even since, he has sat in my bedroom, watching me as I go about my day to day. As he does somewhat resemble me, or what a more elderly version of myself might entail, I do occasionally think of him as my version of the Picture of Dorian Gray.