December 2009: "I work by the studio window. Outside the snow has gone. Uniform grey blankets all. We are in the eternal twilight between Christmas and New Year, between Edvard Munch's December birthday and his January death. I'm staring at the board on which I'm working, three foot by two. I'm attempting to create an image of Edvard's sister Sophie from a family photograph taken in 1868. Sophie is aged six; in a few short weeks the mother sitting by her will be dead. Sophie's holding a peg-armed doll. And she's gazing straight at me. By aged fifteen she'll be dead too.

So, I get to work and try to use my knowledge from teaching children to make her image look life-sized, and feel life-weighted: to make her skinny frame hang right in her ill-fitting smock; to make her clutch on the doll appear correct for one her age. And I want the brush and the paint to do the work, like Edvard would have done. Not any kind of agonized draughtsmanship, but an unconscious flow.

I push some chestnut brown across her lips. One swipe, ending in a faltering droop. And there she is. The Munch genes are unmistakable. This could only be Edvard's sister looking at me, resolved from a hotch-potch of crude modern paint. In 1868 she stood still for the photographer, holding her doll. Photons bounced from her onto the photographic plate. And there she was locked as a smudge of black and white.

Now she breathes again. She is reflecting coloured form into my eyes. Her long-gone chromosomes have transmuted into painted light."

The giant has slashed
The horizon from his
Crouching grave
And spattered
Red tears across the sky

On Munch's birthday

Huge iron eyes
Forged by old tribes
Are peering in

Watching me
Wield my brush
On Sophie Munch's so
Watchful gaze at
My attempt to
Resurrect her

And the giant
Reaches in and
Lifts her from her
Bloody chair in
Fingers fat from
Drinking rain for
Millennia

He's soaking red from her dress
Bleeding to rose pink and pure white
Her sweet innocence.