Why The Long Face?

I have a longish face, not of aardvark proportions, or even horse, just a vertical kind of visage, inherited so far as I can see from both grandfather and father. I look good in wide-brimmed hats.

When I was seventeen, exploring my new adulthood, I bought a trilby, which I wore with pride. By sheer coincidence, ska was king, and post-punk fashions determined that my fashion choice made me acceptable, if eccentric, as I donned the hat, a long greatcoat, and tan cuban-heeled boots, and swished about in this self-designed teen costume. I was strangely unselfconscious at this time, content that I had bought my own clothes, cheered by knowing I was different, appalled always by the prospect of becoming anyone's clone.

I had a peculiar confidence at that age, based on having survived bouts of depression, bullying and adult manipulation over many years, and on being intellectually smart enough to succeed academically despite being almost entirely cynical about the entire schooling machine and western urban society in general. My confidence made me take risks (still true) that others would fear; for example, having sex in the reference section of the school library at 8am most mornings prior to school assembly. The lines of Oxford English Dictionary and dusty walls of similarly never-used brick-like tomes made a visual and sonic barrier for our early morning kissing, groping and frotting. We trusted to luck that nobody would be looking up obscure definitions in the quiet moments before our young minds were officially trained, taking the opportunity to exercise our yearning bodies and get funky.

I survived the ups and downs of early adult life, left school, drifted, worked hard, went to art school. It was here that I began to understand and throw off the shackles of peer pressure, and society's definition of the adult male was putty in my sculptor's hands. For a long period, as I adjusted to living away from home, I concentrated on self-portraiture, not with any particular degree of obsession, but out of a basic drive to find out who I was.

At this tender age with a chin beginning to sprout fluff, I looked if not cherubic, then innocent, but I was fascinated by decay, death and the processes of change, and my work reflected this. I went in twelve months from painting small, cool, representational symbolist canvases which you could hang on a domestic wall to large, hot, high-chroma gestural expressionism, bordering on the abstract whose only home was art school, or the gallery.

For an entire year I wore only the colours red and green, simply because I could. I died my hair red with henna, cut it at random, and used these voodoo offcuts embedded in acrylic paint, adding glass, glitter, ink, metal, collaging representations of myself, re-painting the same over-happy smile taken from a passport photograph again and again. I constructed larger and larger, until my self-image making became entirely divorced from any emotion I felt about myself, shattering kaleidoscopically, like my self-conception. Somehow, in this great uprush of creative expansion, I expressed my emerging self with joy, meeting all challenges, seeking stimulation. I felt like an orange London streetlight that had just come on and started to glow red.

At this time, I lived in safe but decrepit student digs which became a focus for regular pot-fuelled soirees. I had been laughing all evening, with friends. They had gone to bed, gone home, and I was winding down, still fairly stoned, happy. I was looking into a mirror at myself, after cleaning my teeth, rubbing my big jaw, which ached. Looking at myself, I saw that I was always pulling my chin back, so I spontaneously stuck out my chin, Desperate Dan style.

There was a hot tingling in my face as I pushed my face into a shape it had not assumed since puberty, and I felt facial muscles protest at having been locked into place too long. I looked like a crazy gibbon for a few minutes as I massaged and stretched my face, grinning at the foolishness of it all, yet knowing instinctively that this was an important moment of self-realisation and release.

I always thought my chin was too big, and like a lot of people do, I was subconsciously adapting my body posture to compensate for what I considered to be an unattractive quality in myself. I don't remember anyone ever telling me in my childhood that my chin was big - I just compared myself to the androgenous glam pop stars and film stars of the day, and decided that chin of mine was a non-starter. I actually became dizzy after a while and stopped, but over the next days and weeks and months, I gently remoulded my face and liberated myself from that particular inhibition.

A year or two later, a rather staggeringly erotic older woman chased me around a party, and one of the ways she expressed her lust for me was to run the tip of her index finger down the line of my brow, my nose, and all down the long firm line of my big jawbone.

I have long ago adjusted to being me, my proportions and physical quirks. I no longer carry too much of anything around regarding what I should or shouldn't look like, my work requires no specific dress code, and while I enjoy clothing and looking good, I really don't care anymore whether or not I fit into anyone else's concept of an ideal man. I read once that comparing oneself to others was doomed to failure, since it either made you vain or bitter, and this seemed so true that it became a credo which has lasted me until middle-age.

I consider that I am sufficiently attractive to be relaxed about it, but never having been burdened by masculine beauty, nor great ugliness, the process of adjusting to being found attractive has been a peculiar, staged process of losing inhibition and gaining self-love.

Now, aged 44, a single shred of my vanity yet intact, I can celebrate that my long face, the strapping male chin, keep me some years away still from the turkey-hang flaps, the lug-lugs, the doubles and the trebles that gracefully decorate and proliferate the chins of my gorgeous, gallant contemporaries.