"This painting is such a deliberate and awkward gymnastic contradiction. Its composition is so intentional, with the yellow chair catapulting around the top left only to spin in the circle of the table. The figure rises up into this, stopping us and driving us into our humanity. My model for this particular painting was difficult and contrary, which brought a good quality into what I now regard as a contrary painting. Its entire palette is founded in Raphael’s Verdaccio chord of colours, which we associate with his religious altarpieces, casting the figures into a penitent mortality. Although SEINE is a contemporary painting, nothing has changed about human beings. We are as vulnerable and impermanent as the viewers of Raphael’s paintings in the 1400s. The old blood colour of the cherries and the absurd happy little vase of chrysanthemums stands so at odds with the turbulent atmosphere of the painting that it consolidates its contradiction. Even the title of the painting is deceptive: using the river famous in the French capital, I am referring more to its source and more mysterious times. " Edward Povey