Title: You don't know me: Fuck You
Year: 2022
Size: 5400 x 7200 px 300DPI
Technique: digital art

This self portrait was created with a digital camera, then imported into Adobe Photoshop.
The text that was written was created in Adobe Illustrator which was imported into Adobe Photoshop.
A photo taken by the artist C. 1995 of simple noticeboard coloured pins was incorporated through the artwork digitally.
The piece was then combined, text, portrait and pins, and manipulated in Adobe Photoshop at high resolution.
This piece is a personal piece. It’s a digital Self-portrait, a retrospective visual commentary on the artists past struggles as an creative individual trying to be unique in a world of conformity. Through these struggles, and adventures he learns in the end to say: “You don’t know me. Fuck you.
The artist also writes and keeps a “sort of diary” of his feelings and experiences over the years. Here he writes about how he struggled through his teenage years and beyond, trying to be himself in all his uniqueness and individuality finding his place in a world of conformity. He uses “pins” as a metaphor of pain, representing the cruel comments and actions of people directed to his individuality, which though he was a rebellious character, pinned him down. Pins that pierced his very being and drew the blood of his soul.
After many years, and many good and bad, rich and diverse, experiences from his travels around the world, he managed to find his strength and his courage. He realised that every pin and every piercing and the blood that was drawn, was not the blood of pain but instead the blood of colours. These colours were the colours of creativity, born from suffering and experience. Turning his suffering into colour, he realized no one really knows him, and he said… fuck you.
From that moment on, his creativity was reborn.