Private Collection of Eugene Mullen

"I vaguely remember wanting to respond to Damien Hirst in my own way.
Hirst was making known his interest in the theme of death, with his presentation of animals in formaldehyde and I wanted to respond to the theme in my own deliberately anachronistic way with a naturalistic painting, so I turned to the 1850s and the pre-Raphaelite period.

I used to go to the Lady Lever gallery in Port Sunlight when I was a teenager and I loved the Pre-Raphaelite paintings they have there.
I appreciated their attempts at eliciting genuine emotion from their paintings which was diametrically opposite in tone to what was going on artistically in the 'ironic' nineties . I loved ‘Home from Sea 1862’ by Arthur Hughes which actually hangs at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. It is a painting of a young boy lying in sorrow, on the grave of his mother, after returning too late from sea. Even though the theme is sad, it’s a sunny day that’s depicted.

I suppose my painting is a 90s take of this romantic gothic tradition. When I moved to London I visited lots of places I had wanted to go, like Chiswick House and Highgate Cemetery. I used aspects of Highgate Cemetery for the background of this painting after visiting it, with my camera and my friend Ged Adamson.
Appropriately, I was listening to the Smiths at the time and one song 'Cemetery Gates' gave me the title I needed. The model was a friend Jane Adams and she has her 90s gear on here. She's got her hair up in a kind of bun, a bit Amy Winehouse-ish. Jane’s hair was originally blonde but I made it black to contrast with the pale skin as I wanted a Japanese wood block aesthetic. I wanted to give her expression, the melancholy demeanour of a Madonna or a Mary Magdalene".