PETIT POIS

Jan Manton Gallery 2020

“As I started making this work in April 2020, we went into confinement. And the paintings became something very different. At their base is the idea of layering. The image is the result of embedded layering and this is where the story of the princess and the pea – the green pea – comes in. I always loved the Hans Christian Anderson tale of the twenty mattresses with the pea at the bottom because, in a painting, the underpainting, the first few marks and impressions have a way of coming all the way through and manifesting themselves on the surface.” from interview with Louis Martin Chew