Each sitter held up against their face a torn page taken at random from a magazine. Writers ranging from Alan Bennett to Joanna Trollope posed for my polaroid camera.
Two of my sitters happened to be Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. They shuffled in like bewildered refugees. Iris Murdoch was dishevelled and childlike and John Bayley was attentive and concerned. I was not aware of her condition and, fearful of charging my memory with false impressions, I would say that she enjoyed our encounter as a child would enjoy a game, which of course it was.
The couple strangely merged as one and so I made a triptych of the 'three' of them. Out of the faces of both emerged a dream face, a puckish reinvention of an earlier life. The result was immediate yet complex, simple and personal, an abstraction of the essence I must have sensed, or to be completely fanciful, was willed upon me.'
