"My first ever oil painting. My New York gallery, Scholten, is currently celebrating 30 years of woodblock printing, which I began in Tokyo in 1993, but here is the quiet beginning to my oil painting career ten years earlier, 40 years ago this month, in December 1983 in my bedroom in Alloa in Scotland. I was 16 years old when I decided to try painting in oils and this was the first painting I completed, a self portrait in a dark shower, with my hand on the glass covered with sprays of mist and drips of water. I had peroxided my hair the month before, as was the fashion of that time, and wanted to record the tousled assisted blond. The anatomy is rather off, as I was two years away from my studies at art school, and I also hadn’t yet grown the chest hair that developed through my twenties but the fascination with Caravaggio’s raking sidelight is there. I have this in California now because my father recently sent three paintings from Scotland which had been stored in his attic for decades. Two other early works, my second oil painting and one from my Paris years, were also in the crate, and I'll post them in due course." Paul Binnie, Dec 16, 2023
