To start working on this painting I looked a lot of the work of Jenny Saville.
Jenny Saville often paints large scale paintings of obese women who pretty much fill the canvas. She says it's about creating something that is literally too big for the frame of society and I really like that about her work. I decided to do a painting of my dog, Coco. She is fat so she fit the profile but more than that, the companionship of a dog transcends that same frame of society that Saville indicates. I found the largest canvas I could find and used oil paints. I didn't want the portrait of my black and grey dog to be boring so I used blues, reds and yellows to move the eye.
