You've Been A Man Today

2025

When something’s difficult, or can’t be had,
We crave and cry for it all day like mad.
Forbid a thing, we pine for it all night,
Press fast upon us and we take to flight.

The Canterbury Tales

You’ve Been A Man Today is the title of an ongoing series of sixteen self-portrait drawings that confront ideas of masculinity. the inherited complexities of body image and gender identity. These drawings aim to exonerate the self from the limitations, contradictions and irrationality of manliness as we know and understand it in the west.

Humorous and humiliating, sardonic, discomfiting, awkward, innocuous and sad. Blemished, shapeless pants accentuate the nakedness of this this pant-clad Pierrot. We observe him learn, examine, indludge, doubt and disclaim his manliness, of all that it offers, all that it denies. Each drawing is characterised by a particular pose or gesture which both accentuates and destabilises his gender. Some of the self-portraits contain an abnormality, a divergent feature or aspect that unsettles the otherwise faithful representation: ill-proportioned limbs and distorted facial features typify the uneasiness with which this figure regards himself.

You've Been A Man Today was initiated through the Home Grown Window Residency programme at Home Grown Window Residency: Vincent Stokes - Stryx Birmingham December 2024 - April 2025

All works were completed in 2025 and are pencil on paper, measuring approx 22cm x 15.5cm unframed.

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Vincent Stokes is a visual artist currently living and working out of the West Midlands, UK. In 2018, he graduated from the Birmingham School of Art with an MA distinction in fine art whereupon he immediately began exhibiting across the region. In 2021, The New Art Gallery Walsall purchased his drawing A Family under Lockdown for their permanent collection.

In 2022, his first solo exhibition The days I have found, the days I have held... opened at The Asylum Art Gallery, Wolverhampton. In 2023, he was selected for membership of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists as an RBSA Graduate Artist (GRBSA). His work has featured in international publications and is held in private collections in Europe and north America.

My work is an attempt to consolidate the seemingly overlooked significance of the prosaic day-to-day through the explication of iconography. Broadly speaking, my work employs aesthetic devices such as gesture, countenance, symbolism and allegory to articulate and amplify the quiet complexities of identity. I seek to illuminate the unmemorable. In so doing, my drawings serve to acknowledge the ethereal nature of the commonplace. I want to reconcile the transcendental notions of self with the aesthetic of the everyday.