As with most of my "fine art" work, this is based on an "appropriated" or "found image" - in this case a jpeg photo of a woman from a pornographic website.
Like a lot of artists my age (ie, no spring chicken) I was deeply influenced by the work of Marcel Duchamp and well as his later followers in Pop art and most especially the "Picture Generation" Neo-Conceptualist artists of the 1970's and 80's (Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, etc).
Like those artists, I've always been interested in how the meaning of an image is determined and how it changes over time and in context. "Style" and other formal qualities strike me as tools to be deployed to these ends, rather than as some sort of inner spiritual essence.
This particular piece started life in 2005, when I made hundreds of tests by downloading images and then running them through various combinations of Photoshop filters to see what would happen to them. Mostly there was nothing too interesting, but occasionally one would stand out by resembling or implying something new, as though its original meaning and associations had shifted somewhere else.
In the best cases, there was still a whiff of the older meaning in the piece, which I always liked. In the case of "Ayanna," I enjoyed the resulting confusion of sleazy/cheap/low/prurient with arty/abstract/classy/high-faluting, but I wished it looked a bit more "painterly" or "handmade" to really seal the deal.
In 2012 I made a number of silkscreen prints of the image, and painted onto them by hand to see if I could get what I had in mind. I liked the results but still didn't feel they went far enough (also, as I've mentioned before in other posts and places, I'm opposed to making precious original objects - for political reasons, dear comrades).
So, here's my latest stab at finishing the piece, with "Expressionist" painterly effects created digitally, in a nod to the disruptive and troubling styles of artists such as Emil Nolde and Edvard Munch.