The Story of the 4 Self-portraits

Misha del val, Untitled, oil on canvas, 35 x 35 each, 2013

I painted these self-portraits in a couple of hours, covering unfinished paintings, with the aid of a small mirror, listening to punk rock music, at the Old Potato Shed, Robertson, Australia, where I then had my studio, on an autumny Sunday evening, after having spent the day with my daughter, diving in waterholes and watching Studio Ghibli movies. 

In Robbo, I was subletting my studio-space from big-shot Australian artist B. Q. The morning after I had painted the self-portraits, B. Q. dropped by the studio. He just wanted to see everything was going. We chatted while he looked distractedly around the space. Then his eyes paused on the four small portraits. After an instant of silence, he complemented the works and went on to suggest why not enter them into a prestigious portrait art prize taking place in the city soon (of which he happened to be part of the jury). I smiled, pretending to be flattered, secretly vexed at the equivocalness of the remark. On one of the walls hung a large canvas of an elegantly dressed lady, who had been involved in the Sydney art scene for half a century and was also good friends with B. Q. I had agreed to paint her picture for that year’s edition of the portrait competition. The painting, for which I had worked for weeks, was obviously my entry-to-be. In the shower, I gave it a second though, but ultimately dodged the temptation of following B. Q.’s suggestion, kept to my word to the sitter and entered Lady Elsa’s portrait to the Archibald Art Prize. The painting never made it through to the prize’s selection process finalists.

The self-portraits were part of an exhibition I held in a Sydney gallery some weeks later. I was relying on the sales from this show to pay off my modest debts (mostly related to framing), pack my gear, get myself a one-way ticket and relocate in Berlin, after 11 years living in Australia. After the exhibition's opening night however, only a couple of small works on paper had been sold. The lack of sales jeopardised my travelling plans and for a couple of days my mood sunk. I felt dejected before the prospect of having to stay longer, indeterminately, in the Continent Island.

On the third day however, I got a redeeming call from the Sydney gallery owner. He told me on the phone the four self-portraits had been sold that very morning. He said a man had stopped a taxi in front of the gallery entry, greeted him politely at the front desk, inquired about the self-portraits, which he had apparently seen in an invitation; then he went upstairs, carefully looked at the paintings, came back downstairs and bought the four of them in one go, before leaving the gallery in the same taxi. The self-portraits became thus my ticket to Berlin and the reason why I live in Europe nowadays.

That summer in Berlin I met Raisa Raekallio again after 13 years, but that is a bite for a different story... Not long after I had settled in my apartment in Friedrichshain, I received a short Linkedin message from the person who had purchased the self portraits (let’s call him T). He was keen to meet the man behind the face on the pictures. A couple of cordial emails followed, along with the promise to meet up in person next time I would visit Australia. T and I met six months later in his art-work crowded, worldly-wise looking, Edgecliff, Sydney office. We soon became friendly. T commissioned me to paint his portrait and that of his wife. He bought a couple of other self-portraits I had made in Berlin that year. T’s interest in my art turned out to be of instrumental help for my subsequent travels between the Old Continent and Australia to be with my daughter.

Then in 2016, while I was on a visit in Australia, T and I sat for lunch in a poorly lit restaurant in the Southern Highlands of NSW. The atmosphere was charged with the promise of rain, and the gaps in between courses elongated. Our conversation that day wandered from unborn books to chapters of T’s annual visits to Venice, and from gardening tips to life reorienting events. I enjoyed listening to T’s vehement remarks. After coffee, T handed me a large-sized bag with the four self-portraits in it. ‘Please don't take offence’ said the man ‘we have recently moved into a smaller cottage in the countryside and we don’t have anymore as much room as I’d like to for artworks’. He added the self-portraits had cheered (and challenged) him while they hung on his Sydney office. T kept the other paintings he had bought from me but he wanted me to have those portraits back, for which he had paid not even three years before over $5,000.

In time, I hopped from Berlin to Finland and got the works shipped back home. My first gig with the Artists’ Association of Lapland a couple of years ago was a curated group exhibition at Kellokas gallery and the four self-portraits featured in it. The critic who covered the exhibition wrote: ‘Misha del Val created […] three messianic face pictures. Man takes himself to be God. But fangs cannot easily be easily concealed’. Lord knows.

The story doesn't end there. Earlier this year, in the middle of the corona crisis, someone who had seen the self-portraits on the net contacted me and, after some give-and-take, bought two of them. The four siblings separated for the first time: a couple were sold for the second time and shipped to Germany, where they found a new home in a private collection; the other two reminded with me in Finland. 

Presently the works rest on the walls of Napa gallery in Rovaniemi. Sitting in the comfort of my living-room, I now take a look on the screen of my computer at the person flashing on these four square-shaped, life-size portraits  and, full of perplexity, wonder who that fellow is.