Jan van Eyck is the guy that you want. Van Eyck put himself in reflections in mirrors, armour, an even pearls in some of his paintings. http://www.google.com/search?q=Jan+van+E… Here are a couple more: Allison Bickle puts herself as the hero in dreamlike fantasy in her fun paintings http://www.google.com/search?q=alison+bl… Possibly the most famous example of an artist painting himself into a painting isFrancisco Goya painting himself in the shadows on the left side of his famous painting of Charles lV and his family. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Franci… Gustave Courbet put himself with all of his models into his well-known painting "The Artist's Studio" http://foldingtime.files.wordpress.com/2… If you are into self referential works read Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" Vonnegut put characters from his older books together and he is the man responsible for all of their success, failures, joys and misery because he is the author that made them up. For example, in one scene a character is bothering him, so Vonnegut writes in a barking dog to distract the character. He leaves you with a strange suspicion that we are all either authors of our world or characters in someone else's book.
