In this large-scale self-portrait, Dale Frank embodies aspects of his early performance work, its scale and medium capturing the immediacy and gestural movement of that work. An artist specifically interested in exploring the interior of the self and the relationship between the subconscious and conscious worlds, Frank's drawings seem to occupy a position that conflates the boundaries between self and other, interior and exterior, subconscious and conscious.

Although Frank employs elements of the Surrealist's vocabulary — the repeated eye motif, biomorphic forms and an almost unconscious rendering of the image — his drawings are not an overt illustration of the juxtaposition of rational and irrational thought. They are, however, similarly immersed in the search for self-knowledge that entails traveling into unknown territory.

The obsessively rich surfaces and mazes of lines in this work can be seen as metaphorical equivalents of the artist's complex and multi-layered personality. These finely traced lines, which expand and contract like magnetic fields, bear the evidence of a struggle to give shape to an idea. The obsessive fascination with filling the entire field is a convention that links this work to some symbolist art (e.g. the sky in Van Gogh's landscapes or the sinuous curves in Jan Toorop's work), but unlike these artists, Frank rejects the possibility of mimesis as a means to indicate his interior states. Something deeper than surface reality is represented in Self portrait at being crowned the father of Australian drawing with 25 flies: inner tensions and searching are made exterior and embodied in the densely inscribed 'skin' or surface of the drawing.