The portraits are all based upon or stem from my partner as I imagine her in various poses as she goes about her day to day activities. ie weeding or as a weed, sitting, seated, singing, yelling and sleeping to mention a few. During the pandemic I started drawing my idea of a character ‘Mag’, from Samuel Becketts novel “Molloy”. She was a mess of a person in a state of blithering decay.. but this evolved into drawing something in my own real world that had its own personality and humour.

The drawings for the works are executed very quickly to the point where they come into existence in “seconds” and in this way come into being as surprising and quite silly.

Combining a set group of elements which get consistently employed to describe parts of the face/head. Not dissimilar from the “Vendaface” machine on the old Sesame Street program, which removes all features from a puppet head and them re-assembles them, often out of place. Here a diamond for an eye, a black circle for a hair bun, a wormy “C” for an ear, a comma for nostrils etc. I guess I am looking to make a non serious doodle/drawing into a solid thing through the act of building it into a painting, as if the character, now manifest in painting, has a kind of “what on earth am I doing here” sensibility.

Martin Poppelwell, 2025.