A painting that came slowly gently out of the dark brown ground of a book cover. It began with the stripes and I wanted to retain a dark brooding quality to it. A woman on the grass. I was initially thinking of a Francoise Hardy album cover, her sitting on the grass. I kept changing the head, trying different hairstyles, hair colour, skin pigmentation, make-up. I lost Francoise along the way. I based her head finally on a photograph in a biography of Ted Hughes, a photograph of one of his lovers?
She also looks very like a woman I slept with long ago. Jackie.
She smoked and wore blue mascara. I caked the paint on her. She was pretty wild and all over the place. A bit Courtney Love. Mercifully It was a relationship that didn’t last very long.