You've Been A Man Today
2025
You’ve Been A Man Today is the title of a series of sixteen self-portrait drawings that confront ideas surrounding masculinity. Inspired by 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.
These drawings are at once humorous and humiliating, sardonic, ridiculous, pitiful, innocuous and embarrassing. Poses, expressions and compromising gestures are in these drawings performed by a strange pant-clad Pierrot: grey, blemished, ill fitting y-fronts accentuate the nakedness of this this bloodless creature. We observe him learn, examine, embrace and ultimately despair of his manliness, of all that it offers, of all that it denies. He is exposed.
Each drawing is characterised by a particular pose or gesture which both accentuates and destabilises his manliness. Each self-portrait contains an abnormality; some divergent feature or aspect that unsettles an otherwise faithful representation: ill-proportioned limbs and distorted facial features typify the uneasiness with which the figure regards himself. These motifs subvert the solemnity and assumed authority traditionally associated with posture, body language and countenance.
Discussing this work Stokes explains
Despite my ignorance to what particular qualities and characteristics meant throughout my childhood, I was made increasingly aware of what was expected of me as ‘a man of the house.’ Masculinity was something given to me. Though I was never actively discouraged from pursuing homonormative ideas and activities, and despite me never being rigorously indoctrinated into the cult of Manhood, I was – unconsciously, perhaps – made to think about myself as something that my three siblings were not – a man.
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