Renoir's Portrait of Jeanne Samary

This is all wrong- gooey pink everywhere, cheeseball pose, it's almost a Keane painting with the big liquid dark eyes. (I used to think the pink/orange field was a flower backdrop but now I'm pretty sure it's posed against a receding floral wallpaper, which contributes to the intimacy.)

But it is an incredibly successful portrait -time is evaporated, drunk on absinthe and the air in the cafe buzzes with inexhaustible affection, not for an object, but a formidable, bright, slightly sarcastic actress who knows all too well her power over soppy impressionists who've been too giddy painting fat chicks at mystical group baths.

And I'm just realizing looking at this that the spins and blizzards in my work may source from my love of this painting. A quick work, but this is no snapshot. It is an evening of hours in the cafe, each moment touched by the brush. A modern eye is likely to read the variant "focus"(her eye and hand in sharp detail) as equivalent to a narrow depth of field in a camera, close but not quick - the focus corresponds sensitively what you are paying attention to, and the time and motion it suggests.

This kind of initimacy and humanism is exactly the sort of thing they were afraid would happen during the Rennaisance, and it's worth noting that it was politically radical even in the 19th century- this is a hard nosed loving portrait, a woman neither fallen nor pure, and in spite of the setting obviously not passive. Equivalents to this approach nearly sank the career of John Singer Sargent in Madame X and earlier scandalized Paris with Manet's Olympia. If feminism really is the radical notion that women are people, this drippy, sweet, love-sick beautiful nonsense qualifies.

My fear is that it is exactly the kind of thing the culture of another high technology era views as inefficient, hopelessly deluded, or even suspicious. There is a growing whiff of techno-puritanism in both contemporary art and mass culture, not, strangely, against sex, which after all can easily be made a commodity, but against something like patient longing. The morose cleanliness of art and design rife in digital graphics, but with a misleading history of boldness and freedom from the 1920s, has become an orthodoxy.