Based on a drawing of someone I know sleeping but then later mixed with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe sleeping, or, come to think of it, maybe dead. It’s a version of a previous larger painting based on Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘The Bed’.
An image of a dreamer and a smoker.

Surely no-one smokes in bed these days?

Painting and smoking seemed to go together for so many people I knew (Oil Paint probably being on the same list of carcinogenic substances as tobacco.) Smoke is interesting to paint, the drift of it. And it’s a gaseous thing which you are making kind of solid. You can get paint to bleed and run and drift like smoke. Paint is alchemical, turning from one thing into another. Smoke is a dreamy thing, no? I think I associate smokers with romantics, flawed friends who I love, people who put things off, outsiders. Now these people really are outcasts, shepherded to designated outdoor spaces, unless its their own space, a bed or car.

Surely no-one drives and smokes these days?

I was thinking of the stripes of the duvet echoing the pattern of curling smoke, and perhaps the dream of the sleeper.
The title is from Max Romeo song ‘Wet dream’. I thought of less in terms of Jamaican patois but baby speak, and when we sleep there can be a childlike vulnerability. Of course it is a sexual allusion but also maybe to bed-wetting or, more pedantically, to a dream involving water.