I am interested in the connections between cinema and painting in particular the way the close-up is used to portray intense emotions. The images can be seen as a ‘complete segment of reality’ (Christian Metz – Film Language). Divorced from their original context, the images become hard to locate in terms of place and time and take on an elusive timeless quality. The faces are both intimate and impersonal, familiar and anonymous. They leave room for the projection of narrative or meaning by the viewer. The scale of my larger paintings (sometimes up to two or three metres in width) relates directly to the idea of a cinema screen and the implied saturation of the viewer’s visual field.