Violet is the colour that argues. It will not sit beside a warm shadow without insisting on something, and the painting was a long negotiation with that insistence. The figure came easily; the colour around her took most of a winter.
I do not paint the sitter. I paint the temperature of the air between us.
The reproduction is deliberate — a second pass at a picture that had been solved once and then forgotten, to see whether the second solving would be kinder or only different. It was both.
