Roeg's gallery

Challenged to create a portrait of cult film director Nic Roeg, artist Michael Clark has come up with a seriously weird work. By GEOFFREY MACNAB

TO BE HUNG inside a Perspex boxthat in itself is quite interesting," muses Nic Roeg as he contemplates Michael Clark's new portrait of him. Al-Jebr, as it is called (which means "bone- setting" in Arabic), is indeed a striking piece of work.

We see Roeg's face on the front, painted in oil on linen to look like an old daguerrotype or a death mask. The director of Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Castaway is staring outward with as melancholy an expression as you'd find in a late Rembrandt self- portrait.

Clark has filled the back of the image (which is designed to dangle from the ceiling like a severed head) with cryptic references to Roeg's life and movies. There is meteorite, gold leaf, a lead fishing weight, beeswax, an embalmed bumble bee, a big, bloody gash, and even some human organic material.

What does it all mean? Is the gash some sort of reference to the torching to death of the tycoon (Gene Hack-man) in Eureka or to the bullet spiralling through the rock star's brain in Performance? Why are there hypodermic needles stuck in the papier-mch skull? (Is it something to do with the fact that Roeg directed the first Aids awareness films?) You might as well ask a homesteader in a Western what it felt like to be scalped by the Apaches as quiz Roeg about the symbolism in Clark's portrait. "That's for the artist to say, but I think it's an extraordinary piece of work and I would recognise myself in it," is all he will say.

Back in 1980, when one Rank executive dismissed his necrophilia- based classic Bad Timing as "a sick film made by sick people for sick audiences", the idea that Roeg might one day end up as the National Portrait Gallery's final exhibit of the 20th century would have seemed very farfetched indeed.

Why Roeg? The Gallery already had one piece by young artist Michael Clark (a more conventional portrait of the filmmaker Derek Jarman) and wanted another. "I told them the only person I was interested in doing was Nic Roeg," says Clark (whose other work include paintings of Muriel Belcher and Lisa Stansfield).

In theory, the NPG trustees place no restrictions on an artist's medium - silhouettes, watercolours, sculptures, miniatures, oils, drawings and photographs are all equally permissible. ("I think they knew they wouldn't get a straight head and shoulders," suggests the artist.) Nevertheless, they were a little startled by the object Clark presented to them.

Charles Saumarez Smith, the NPG's director, warned Clark "it would take a certain amount of time for the trustees to digest" his creation. Roeg himself was taken by surprise. "I didn't have a clue what he was doing until he arrived with it," he chortles. "It's as much an expression of his work as a likeness of me."

He and Clark were more or less strangers (they'd met once) when the piece was commissioned two years ago. "Michael had that quality which I'm interested in in actors too - he wasn't totally sure of himself. He was struggling to find something."

Clark describes Roeg as if he was the human equivalent of a London taxi.

"Nic very kindly offered himself as a vehicle for me to make an image," he says. "When we met, I told him it was going to be f***ing weird. He just nodded and said Good.

"I wanted to make an image which had the director inside it in the same way he's inside his movies an image which touches on some of the preoccupations of not only Nic Roeg but myself: sex and violence and space."

The piece is to be kept in a Perspex box. The effect is startling - it looks as if Roeg's head has been cryogenically frozen. The filmmaker isn't sure what his family will make of it. "It's something for strangers," he suggests, "some intimate thing for strangers. Michael has stayed his own artist. I think it has been brave on both his and the Gallery's part."

The portrait is unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery on Thursday.

Copyright 1999
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