The Wonder Series: Enter Parma Violet.
Painted May 26, 2024
Reflected July 22, 2025
It was a Sunday when I painted Parma Violet. May 26th, 2024. Exactly twenty days after I painted Pan, and by that point, I was completely charged up. The rush of finishing Pan was still in my system, and I couldn’t wait to get back to the table. Sundays had started to become my sacred painting days. I knew what was coming. I sat down with intention, knowing I wouldn’t be getting up for at least ten hours. That’s how long these paintings take me now - between nine and twelve hours of being completely locked in.
The atmosphere was calm. Qui was on the sofa watching TV, music floating on and off through the background. It was one of those soft, lovely Sundays in late spring when you feel yourself begin to wake up again. I’d already started looking through references before I even lifted a brush, scanning for something that would spark the same kind of excitement that Pan had given me. I didn’t know what I was looking for, exactly, but I did know I wanted to shift the tone. Boy in Red Glasses and Pan had leaned into something masculine and bold. This time, I wanted to lean into something more feminine - or at least softer.
The idea for Parma Violet came less as a full concept and more as a feeling I was trying to chase. I loved the startled expression in Pan - the way his face looked like he was caught mid-breath, either about to speak or move. There was so much wonder in it, and I wanted to find that again. I was drawn to faces that held astonishment. That look of surprise. That wide-eyed moment of being fully present.
So I started looking. Thousands of reference images, trying to find someone who had that same charged energy. When I found her, the woman I used as the basis, I wasn’t interested in her likeness. That wasn’t the point. She had a flash of something in her face - a quick charge of wonder - and that was enough for me to jump in. My paintings in this series don’t aim to replicate the reference. They’re a departure. The reference is just the ignition. Once the emotion is there, I take over.
And if I’m being honest, part of this was dopamine chasing. I’d had such a high painting Pan, such an incredible meditative experience, that I just wanted to feel it again. That’s a very me thing to do. If I love a song, I’ll play it twenty times in a row. Same thing here. I wanted the same fix, the same rush, and I was searching for it through the brush.
The painting didn’t have a name at the beginning. They never do. I’d laid down all the skin tones, all the underpainting, and left the eyes and the hair till last. The original reference had boring brown hair and brown eyes, and I remember sitting there thinking, I’m not doing that. I need to shake this up.
I looked at my palette and decided to do something completely instinctive. I chose violet for the eyes. It wasn’t rational. It was purely a reaction. As I painted them in, something stirred. I started remembering a scene from the 1990 film The Witches, where a boy watches a mysterious woman walk up the street. She’s actually a witch, disguised. And I had this weird moment where I realised I was painting her. Not literally, but energetically. Suddenly, that character was living in the painting.
Anne Lambton in Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches (1990)
When I got to the hair, I didn’t want to fall into old habits. I’ve always struggled with hair - it often feels like an afterthought. I spend so much time getting the face right that by the time I get to the hair, I rush it. But this time, I changed everything. I dropped the paintbrush, picked up a palette knife, and just started scooping the oils off the palette. I mixed in titanium white, ultramarine, cobalt, some leftover pink from an old painting of Qui. I didn’t blend it fully. I just went for it. I smeared it, dragged it, let it radiate.
It was like a final, joyful crescendo. After all that delicate face work, this explosion of colour and movement at the end gave the whole thing life. Hair like an aura, glowing and wild. It was pure play. And that was the turning point.
Unlike the others in the series, Parma Violet wasn’t painted all in one go. I usually paint alla prima, but I lost the light that day and had to stop. I came back a few days later and picked up where I left off. At first, I thought it wasn’t working - I’d overworked the face and the nose felt off. But I let it dry, came back, and used the first pass as an underpainting. The second pass was magic. It came together. I hit it. It worked.
That pause was important. It taught me something. That even if the first run doesn’t land, there’s room to come back with a fresh hand and see something new. I don’t always give myself that space. But this time I did, and it mattered.
Looking back, Parma Violet taught me to experiment. To be bold. To break away from the chocolate-box prettiness of safe painting and lean into colour, energy, instinct. To let something tip into the grotesque if that’s where the emotion lives. To play, unapologetically.
It was the first time I really brought abstraction into the work - not conceptually, but physically. That hair, that palette knife chaos, that wild freedom. It became the seed of everything I’m doing now. My current work is like a heightened version of that moment - wilder, louder, freer.
There was something else going on, too - something quieter. This painting happened in spring. And I’ve noticed a pattern now, looking back. I don’t paint in winter. I hibernate. But as March rolls in, the light returns and the world starts to wake up, I do too. Parma Violet marked that return. A reawakening. A painting synced with the season.
Since then, Parma Violet has gone out into the world. It showed at Fox Yard Studio in Suffolk, in a group exhibition called Mystical, which couldn’t have been more fitting. It’s been exhibited, sold as prints, and it’s the piece most people gravitate to in the series. There’s something about it - maybe the quirkiness, maybe the colour, maybe the character - that draws people in.
MYSTICAL 2024 - Group Show - Fox Yard Studio. Art centre in Stowmarket, England.
It’s also pulled in a particular type of viewer. People who love the spiritual, the slightly witchy, the alternative. And it makes sense. When I look back at myself in the 1990s - the fishnets, the eyeliner, the purple hair - I can see echoes of that girl in Parma Violet. It pays homage to her in a way I didn’t realise at the time.
And then there’s her alter ego. Because if Parma Violet had one - and she definitely does - she’d be Nancy Downs from The Craft. That twisted, magnetic wildness. That electric madness just beneath the surface. She’s also the mysterious woman from The Witches. And maybe, just maybe, she’s Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. All of them are tucked inside her - unknowingly woven into the fabric of the painting, like pop-culture ghosts.
Fairuza Balk as Nancy Downs in Andrew Fleming’s The Craft (1996)
Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Frank Perry’s Mommie Dearest (1981)
The name came at the end, just like always. I finished the piece, stood back, and without thinking, I said it aloud: “Parma Violet.” It wasn’t overthought. It was instinct. It looked like the sweet. It felt like it. That unmistakable scent - lavender, sugar, something slightly powdery and surreal. It made perfect sense.
That’s what Parma Violet is to me now. A really, really sweet voice. Sweeter than anything. With an accent of lavender - calming, serene - until she blinks, and Nancy smiles back.
Parma Violet 2024
508 x 406mm
Oil on heavyweight paper
Portrait studies 2024
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