The duotone paintings—executed on canvas in oil and gilded aluminium—all testify to the reverently handmade quality of Phillips’ work. The stark use of black and white was a departure from thes artists usual heightened colour palette. In the portrait Ingrid Boulting (After John d Green) (2002), we are presented with a close-up of a girl’s face, a Twiggy look-alike, eyes cast downward at the viewer, and mouth half-open, implying a powerful yet submissive pose. In a pair of images, Venetia Cuninghame (right), (After John d Green) (2002) and Venetia Cuninghame (left), (After John d Green) (2002), a girl with wet hair is portrayed in mirror image—as a dualistic fantasy. Everything is chromatically intensified in the paintings—from the glaring whites of the models’ eyes to their dark, kohl-black lashes—which are rendered in a pure, unmarked style.

Cropped in a sexually provocative manner, and presented without the contextual details of a setting, the models become emptied out, voided. The paintings’ reflective surfaces accentuate this distant, vacant and mask-like quality, simultaneously suggesting they are rarefied and hieratic, set-back and untouchable. The women appear to be representatives of a higher order, like medieval icons, empty and available for veneration.