“This is from a group of paintings that forms my response to Le Lit (1892), the famous Toulouse Lautrec painting housed in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Lautrec paints the heads of two women- doubtless prostitutes- working in a maison close, in happy conversation, cosseted by soft pillows, with covers tucked up to their chins, far away from their clients. Only their heads protrude from the safety of the bedding.
I’ve expanded on Lautrec's playful view of the bed and its two heads (the canvas is roughly the same size as Lautrec’s), playing with what it entails as a staged setting with various imagined protagonists of indeterminate sex: zooming onto heads on pillows seen from above and below. Imagined participants are painted talking or kissing.
The structure of Lautrec’s bed largely disappears with only an occasional glimpse of a bed post or the folded corner of a pillow to suggest edges. These are invitations to bedtime stories of intimacy, jealousy, games, solitude and a hint of the bed as the place for our final conversation.”

“It’s not a matter of painting life, it’s a matter of giving life to painting.” Pierre Bonnard