I was browsing in the National Gallery shop when I saw a pack of postcards entitled ‘Colour your own Monet and the Impressionists’. Irresistible!

I didn’t think I wanted to colour my own Monet, or anyone else, but when I looked at the postcards they were intriguing: just outlines without any of the colour that is the hallmark of Impressionism. I wondered what it would be like to colour them in randomly and then, because I know how hard it is to be random, my thoughts turned to inverting the colours. I found the relevant images online and put them through an online colour inversion programme.

Then I picked up my felt tip pens …

The results are variable but they all have that uncanny sense of being ‘familiar but not quite’, and some of them have a rather beautiful eerie feel. Hence the series title.

Beautiful Strangers 2022; felt tip on found postcard; 12cm x 16.5cm.

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