'You Can Live the Wrong Life'

There’s a game I sometimes play at the museum: ‘what kind of painting am I today?’ Never, despite my best attempts, am I an angelic Botticelli. When hungover and weary, perhaps a Toulouse-Lautrec. When swaddled in loneliness, absolutely an Edward Hopper.

Projects have been filed, things are being read and re-read, the work seems to be going vaguely in the right direction. I should be happy, or at least satisfied! But I am not! The only thing that has defined this period is a vague, indiscriminate ennui that pervades everything. It’s like I’ve been pouring myself into a vessel that’s too small. Or t... See more

The painting is called Reading at a Table, and it is about exactly that: a woman sitting alone at a table, reading a book by lamplight. Her body seems to morph with the chair, and the book is positioned in a way that it seems to flow into her body, becoming part of her. She has the flowy, strange style of Picasso’s characters, but the strangeness i... See more