One of the outstanding Scottish painters of his generation, Ken Currie is known for his intensely powerful and thought-provoking, confrontational work. While he is a figurative painter, Currie is not – with two notable exceptions – a painter of portraits. The exceptions are a 2008 portrait of Professor Peter Higgs, commissioned by the University of Edinburgh, and Three Oncologists of 2002, commissioned by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and one of the most highly regarded paintings in the collection (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, PG 3296).

Portraiture has, however, always fascinated Currie, in particular that of the painters he admires most – Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya and Jacques-Louis David –and his own work has engaged with its traditions, often obliquely and in ‘imaginary’ portraits. Unfamiliar Reflection is a very personal meditation on Ken Currie’s sense of personal and artistic identity. The painting was made as a direct response to the concept of The Naked Portrait exhibition held at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2007. In the catalogue to that show, Martin Hammer wrote:

The artist stands in front of a canvas, whose solid, illusory presence, like his palette with its globules of paint, heightens the soft immateriality of his body, and of his ghostly reflection in the schematic mirror … The canvas and mirror make reference to the greatest of all self-portraits, Velázquez’s Las Meninas, dramatising the gulf between Velázquez’s confident occupancy of his social role and the isolation of contemporary man, for which nakedness is a telling metaphor.

(Martin Hammer, The Naked Portrait: 1900–2007, Edinburgh 2007)

 The body and its reflection are both insubstantial, somewhat fluid and shifting. Between the figure and his reflection there is a certain mis-match – they do not substitute for one another. They are the same person, but in a qualified sense: the painter is confronted by an ‘other’ self in the mirror. It is the ‘unfamiliar reflection’ of the title. We have a strong sense of contradictory purposes and an alienation of the painter from his subject even as he chases it in the shadows.

Currie has enriched and complicated the conventional set-up of painter-sitter, mirror and canvas. By adding a second mirror he confronts a double self; whilst he looks in one mirror, the other ‘looks’ at him. At the same time, his image in the mirror is at an ungraspable remove. Currie tells of how, on completing the picture, he realised that he had painted in the mirror not himself, but the face of his recently-dead father. It is an image in retreat and a confrontation with mortality.