At around (and I say this loosely as the details are a little foggy) 2006 or 7, I started a couple of sketches from a photo I had of my mum.

My parents were visiting us from the UK, and Mum seemed a little pensive and distracted from what we'd been talking about. I remember she was sewing at the same time, us sat around the dining table. I forget exactly what we were talking about, but I think the topic had turned to a reflective note. I'm not entirely sure what made me grab the camera, but the photo seemed to capture an emotional interlude, and a sort of fleeting sadness.

Now my mum is a tough lady, unfazed by troubles around her. She'd always just coped, made things better, just got on with it. She was (and still is) incredibly pragmatic, in complete contrast to my daydreaming. Needless to say, when I was younger we battled a fair bit. You know what they say about an irresistible force meeting an immovable object? Yep, that was us. But now there was plenty of water under the bridge, and we'd buried past quibbles. I'd grown up and realized that she was right about more then a few things (damn it!). Yet here was an unexpected moment of fragility. I guess it had always been there underneath. I just hadn't noticed…

I'd put the photo away, and came across it several months later, a little surprised at having missed it. After some sketches, it seemed that a painting was needed. And this time, I wanted to try something big (or as big as I've attempted so far). I must say, it wasn't easy. I restarted, and then restarted again. It took a few years, on and off, between other pieces of work. 

At around this time I'd been reading Howard K. Bloom's Global Brain, among other books, and was influenced by the depiction of cells and organisms seemingly following a small group of commands to gather, compete, explore, gorge and resign and how this could be extrapolated to almost any aspect of life. It might be hard to see, but the idea was that I could use that; painting ever smaller circles or strokes within each other to create more or less detail as I needed. Each section would compete or absorb or harmonize with the next, and this would directly relate to the object itself. The surface of the skin. My mum's unconscious insecurity.

Skin is particularly fascinating in this regard, especially skin that is worn in a bit. I'd painted my Gran's smile not that long ago and this was pushing it a bit further. It was a mixture of that painting (a style, so to speak, that I'd used a lot) and the bokeh-type refusal of focus from the painting of Stephan & Juergen. As you can see with the progress shots, I had a bit of a thing for Chuck Close—and it was practical, too; I needed to know where I was placing the marks and this was as good a way of doing it as any. 

I put the last brush mark on some time in 2009, not long before my daughter was born. And life changed just a little.