Autobiographically ‘The Screen is the Palette’ references a number of memories. When I was at university my art history lectures were called ‘The Climate of Ideas’, an interesting title in so far as it set looking at art in a particular contest. ‘The Nude in Art’ was a sub theme of these studies - I have made a number of works in which famous paintings of female nudes from art history appear.
 
In the case of The Screen is the Palette, the nude is Olympia painted by the French artist Ingres, who appears here directly behind Olympia on the lhs of the composition. The painting on the back wall, is another work by Ingres.
 
The head of Richard Hamilton (my favourite artist hero and greatest influence in how I approach my work) appears on the body of St. Peter taken from the rhs of Caravaggio’s The Road to Emmaus. St Peter, in the Caravaggio painting, appears amazed by Christ’s revelation of rebirth. Here, Hamilton appears, on the one hand, to invite us into the scene and, on the other hand, touching a rippled glass screen with a red dot on it - a kind of defining of the depth of the interior space.
 
For me, the work hints at the process of making an artwork and the viewer’s boundaries in terms of real and implied depth. Olympia is, in part, seen through a rippled glass screen suggesting a kind of ‘don’t touch peepshow’. Any potential titillation is removed by the overcrowded space that Olympia and the other players occupy – the scene feels more like a window on an anatomy lesson or the preparatory part of a drawing life class.