These works originate from sketches I made from life in the tiny backstage room at César’s Palace, a small cabaret near Gare Montparnasse, Paris, that I visited a few times to observe as the performers prepared. The technique is an extension of Gauguin’s traced monotype invention using a copper plate in this case, as support, and building up colours to a thick residue on the thin Japanese paper. As these works that are a continuing experiment, there are some fingerprints in the margins. I decided to leave the marks rather than tear down. I am also happy with the inaccurate registration of the plate for each colour as a rather beautiful way of framing the image.