my second go at the archibald. in september of 2004 i had a futsal accident, where a knee smashed my cheekbone. to put it all back together, the surgeon, dr alfred coren, cut from the top of one of my ears, across the top of my head, down through the other ear, then peeled the skin off my face, in order to repair everything without leaving huge scars across my face. and he did an excellent job. in the time i spent with him around then, i learned that he is actually one of the foremost surgeons in his area of expertise (crano-facial reconstruction). i put what he did together with renaissance ideas of image construction. the mona lisa was painted layer by layer - bones, muscle, skin, clothing, as da vinci felt you can't accurately represent an object (in this case human) if you're only painting the surface. i thought that was a similar idea to how the surgeon worked, and also my own style of layering texture up before sitting an image on top. so there's photocopies scans of my smashed face, facial diagrams etc, underneath the final layers of surface image. i also made a feature of his hands, for obvious reasons. and the work is exactly the same dimensions as the mona lisa - 53 x 76cm.
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