Whatever else, I may have found a better use for cling film than wrapping cucumbers. Here we go, what do you think?

What’s the cling film thing all about then? In a selfie-obsessed world I hate them; possibly because however I hold the phone, I always look like a witch. I haven’t got round to applying filters though, instead I go old school and aim the camera at a mirror where at least I can keep a bit of distance between me and the eventual image.

So I took a photo of a reflection and then made a painting of the print of the photo of the reflection makes it four levels removed from reality. The cling film is a commentary on that distance, maybe representing the final distance, the glass on a viewer’s screen and the ultimate distance from the reality.

But before we get too esoteric and disappear up our own fundamentals, it wasn’t planned that way. This is completely serendipitous, an emergent interpretation of the image I left myself with at the various stages of making at least a polyester purse out of my pig’s ear skills. But then, to go back to the writing analogy, that’s how my stories happen. Where some folk map them out and know scene-by-scene what’s going to happen with their characters, mine develop as I write and the ending is often a complete surprise. Why on earth would I think painting would be any different?

Now I need a title and I always struggle with titles. Poets can get away with untitled. Hardly seems fair.