«Girl with Peaches (1)»

In 1887 Valentin Serov painted Girl with Peaches. The sitter was Vera Mamontova, eleven or twelve years old, and he painted her at Abramtsevo, the estate of her father Savva Mamontov. The picture hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery. It shows a girl at a table with a few peaches, and nothing in it is trying to sell you anything. That portrait is the starting point of this Girl with Peaches pop art painting.

In my version she still sits at the table, but the table has changed. Credit cards pile up across the bottom, some with Visa logos, next to stacks of coins, a pen, a black blade and two peaches in thick yellow-ochre paint. She wears a pink sweater with a green and red stripe, scrambled logo letters and a cat asleep in a banana peel. Her face has been cut: a black bar sits on her forehead, a strip across her mouth has slid sideways, and a red dot marks the space between her brows. Big black rectangles cover parts of the sweater, pixel squares gather in the top left corner, and scratched, raised lines run through the black background.

Pop art has always looked at what people buy. In 1962 Andy Warhol lined up 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, one for each flavour, and made a supermarket shelf into a painting. I put the shopping on the table where Serov put the fruit.

I painted this original in 2022. I like how she looks straight at you while everything around her has a price tag. This Girl with Peaches pop art painting is colorful pop art, but the face still feels real to me. It sits with my contemporary portrait paintings, and it works as art for cafés, where people sit near it long enough to notice the cat.

Most of my original paintings are already in private collections, but I paint originals to order in any size. To ask about this one, message me on Instagram or by email. A hand-finished lithograph of this work also exists, and you can order it through Instagram or email.