This was one of the very first oil paintings I created. It was one of the first series of 5 oil paintings, which also included the two paintings of the Cathedral of Porto, that I launched my art career with.

I initially began painting with acrylic, but when I moved to Portugal it wasn’t convenient to pack my acrylic paints, so I just purchased new paints in Portugal. Since I switched to oil, I’ve never wanted to return to acrylic.

I was inspired by a very dramatic painting I had seen in a gallery of a man smashing a chair against a mirror. I loved the illusion of actually painting the mirror and I thought a self portrait like that would be cool.

To help compose the painting, I drew a study on cardboard, cut the cardboard and pieced it back together. The exercise didn’t help much because that is more like a puzzle than a broken mirror, so in the end I just winged it. When I displayed it to my art dealer, his initial reaction was: “the broken mirror shows that it is a poor artist.” I thought this was ironic, because the reason I didn’t break a mirror to do a better study was because I couldn’t afford to break my mirror.

The greenish yellow background is the shade of the wall paper in the flat in Porto that I was living in at the time. I like seeing the elements of expressionism that later evolved into my more mature style.