'Showbar' is the second painting I’ve made of this young woman preparing a lurid cocktail behind the bar at a family friendly holiday resort in the south of England. The first was a small, intimate panel in which we’re close up, positioned as the customer. In this large scale painting, we’ve zoomed out from the scene to reveal that the space is otherwise deserted and there are more visual clues to the holiday park location in the illuminated slushy machines behind the bar. In making this painting I was of course thinking of Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies Bergere’, which is one of my favourite paintings, with its play on pictorial space and inscrutable gaze of its subject. Rather than meeting our eye as Manet’s barmaid does, the woman in ‘Showbar’ is absorbed in her task or her inner thoughts.