Self portrait at being crowned the father of Australian drawing with 25 flies 1983

Imposing in scale, Dale Frank's self-portrait is an exploration of the interior self and the relationship between the unconscious and conscious mind. Exemplifying the immediacy of large gestural mark-making, the obsessively rich maze of lines can be seen as a metaphor for the artist's complex and multi-layered personality. Expanding and contracting like magnetic fields, the contours bear evidence of a struggle to give shape to the search for self-knowledge. Like James Gleeson"s Structural emblems of a friend (self portrait) from 1941 Frank employs common elements of the Surrealist's vocabulary: the repeated eye motif, biomorphic shapes and an almost automatic dream-like rendering of the image.