Seeing Double: Brendan Fitzpatrick on Art, Identity and Reflection

British-Chinese figurative painter Brendan Fitzpatrick on the handheld mirror that puts his art and identity into perspective.

Photo by Vivian Chang

“Mirrors are almost a meditation practice, because I deal with mirrors all the time. I have been using the same mirror since 2019, when I set up my studio in Hong Kong. It’s not special, it’s not decorative, but it has served me well and hasn’t broken on me. I continue to seek reflections in found objects. I recently bought a Chinese cleaver from a famous Hong Kong knife maker and honed the edge of it to a mirror-like sheen to use as the basis for a composition.

All of the self-portraits I paint aren’t just craft exercises they tend to be emotional and existential. When I’m painting a self-portrait and using my mirror, I’m re-examining myself. It’s an opportunity to really look at the path that I’ve trodden and see where I’m going. We all have slightly distorted views of ourselves, whether we take that anecdotally or from studies. It’s very much about perspective, observation, and interpretation.

My mirror invokes that journey of self-reflection. But it also serves to refresh your eye and what you’re looking at. It exposes the truth. Working for a long time, my eyes can go stale, so I hold up the mirror and use it to look at the drawing. Because this is the first time that your brain has seen this flipped image, you see compositional mistakes, errors, colours that you might have gotten wrong. My teachers in Florence always told me that Da Vinci said ‘the mirror is the one true master.’ Using my mirror, I become unstuck in a moment when I’m trying to grow.”