Children do not hold still; they hold something. The doll was the stillness in the picture, and the child was the weather around it. I painted from a handful of photographs and from the room after she had gone, which is where most of the picture actually lives.
The doll is the portrait. The girl is the painting.
The hardest passage was the hand on the doll — small, certain, and already tired of being looked at. I repainted it four times and ended where I began, only with better shadows.
