Sleeping Woman

I think she looks a bit like the woman who encounters Death in my book plate. I don’t know who she is, she just wanders around my head with no clothes on.

When we were looking at one of Cezanne’s big paintings of bathers the other day, my wife got annoyed at him because he didn’t treat the women in the painting as human. There wasn’t any sympathy or connection there. If Cezanne were alive today I think he’d be diagnosed as autistic. He certainly had difficulties connecting with other people. He didn’t like being touched. So I think that for him people were just a particularly problematic element of the landscape. Especially women with no clothes on. But “mythological” naked women were up there at the pinnacle of the artistic canon. So it was important (to his mind) to paint them.

So. Even though this woman is a figment of my imagination, I wanted her to be human. I wanted her arm to fit properly on her body. I wanted the viewer to be able to invent a story about why she is sleeping there, naked.

This is a card-sized print. I could print them on postcards, too. Which would be kinda traditional. I’ve also got some greeting cards with little windows cut in the front, so I can also do a “coy” version. Or is it a peep-show version?