My painting explores the gap between representation and mimesis. Making images of living things is a project with failure written into its code, but it seems to be written into our coding as human beings, too. From the official portrait painting to the intense, melancholy concentration of remembering the details of a moment in the past, we 'see' in images.
The source image for this painting is a Preiser railway modelling figure, about 1cm high, which I drew carefully before painting. I didn't 'copy' the drawing, just remembered it. The figure is made of plastic, so the image, which recalls Chardin, Manet, and Dutch still-life allegories of the fragility of life, homo bulla, 'man is merely a bubble', actually contradicts itself - the head and the bubble-gum are made of the same, solid stuff, and the bubble will stay there forever on her lips like a monstrous grape.
But my painting folds this meaning back on itself again, dragging the low-art, hobbyist's figure into the high-art context and into my own subjective existence.