I have created some unabashedly commercial work in my time and this is one. It is interesting to note the strict hierarchy of cultural value that persists even to these supposedly post-structuralist, post-modern times. The gap between what is considered high and low art is wider than it has ever been, and photo-realism often sits uncomfortably between the two. The pop art of the 1960’s is the obvious example of the appropriation of the ‘low’ art of commercial packaging and advertising by ‘high’ art in the works of Warhol, Hamilton etc. and more recently with Jeff Koons, and certainly super-realist artists like Charles Bell and Robert Cottingham have continued this practice with their imagery of pin-ball machines and shop fronts. However, the photo-realist ‘aesthetic’ has been re-appropriated perhaps more than any other by traditionally ‘low’ art practices, and it is now common to see printed plates of puppies or Elvis rendered in photo-realist style with blurred backgrounds, and throughout European holiday destinations lines of photo-realist portrait painters line the streets as far as the eye can see. This paradox of cultural value of ‘high’ and ‘low’ and ‘anti-art’ as ‘art’ stems from the implosion of values precipitated by Dadaism at the beginning of the 20th century, but although the seeds are sown in these early works, the concept of implosion did not become central to my work until much later.