Bevan's own head and torso are frequently the starting point for his paintings. Seldom has he painted from the model and often one painting generates the next. It is often the artist's own body, especially his neck, head and face that have provided the starting point for radical reinvention of the human form. In this way all Bevan's portraits may be regarded as a form of self-portraiture, or equally one might suggest that such is his empathy for his subjects that the gap between observer and observed is closed down.

As Bevan, himself, has commented:

don't find my subjects divorced from me. On the contrary, in many of the works I use myself as the subject. But when I'm working on a self-portrait, I'm not constantly looking in a mirror and correcting. I still work from drawings and there is an evolution through the work itself. It's not a matter of going back and correcting and formulating some kind of a replica of a person. There is a lot of stripping away. There isn't a lot of excess baggage.1

1. Tony Bevan, interview with JH, February 1993