I have many toy planes in my prop collection. I think about a scene for days, then go to my storage unit to select the toys and ephemera that will be in the scene. It can then take me two or three days to stage the scene - making a shelf (as I did for this painting), hanging up the toys, taking down the toys, moving everything around, setting the lights, and repeating until I’m satisfied. Sometimes, I realize after several days that I have to remove the piece I was fondest of to make the composition work.
Key to this painting is the abstract industrial background, designed to evoke the aged concrete outbuildings of an abandoned WWII airport. (I grew up in Lincolnshire, England next to one of these relics and still recall it vividly.)
I created the graffiti-like background by scratching random letters into the base paint with the paint, using the paint tube like a drawing stick to scrape the surface as I went. I also splashed and dragged paint along the surface and then blotted the whole thing with brown paper to achieve a glassy finish. A smooth background surface was essential because having any texture here would prevent me from making the highly-detailed objects in the foreground.
The blue painter’s tape is painted painted in the ultra-realistic trompe l’oeil style, where these elements look so real you might think there was actually tape on the surface of the canvas. On the tape is a phrase from Shakespeare: “My soul is in the sky.”