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The woman in Graham Little’s Untitled (Mother and Baby) (2019) sits in a bathroom of stone curves and oblong cavities Behind her the view is impeccable: the sea a nacreous blend that accumulates in the sky, save frail crests of distant mountains Pull back, and the room is sterile and tepid A tall Emile Gallé vase hosts white lilies, a plump hobnail glass bottle rests beside a peacock blue decanter Think patchouli, invoke mimosa The bath is drawn; the water waits The shower pipe of chrome tips its heron-esque neck Smiling in her kingfisher blue gown she cradles her clothed babe, her nipple, untouched, only just bare enough for suckling   Little’s immaculate and labour intensive works, on show at Alison Jacques Gallery, take months to complete Each composition emanates a weird, soporific ache Little says of his paintings of women: ‘for a while I can be the woman in that world … I think that’s why they’re all so well honed; I completely immerse myself in that dream’ Undoubtedly, it is a specific kind of woman in a specific world: as perfected and marvelled at as a Fabergé egg This dream evolved during his upbringing in Dundee, when the ravishing chiffons, innocuous gazes and orchidaceous faces of fashion photography enraptured his mind Around 2000, he began rendering photographs from pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and mid-1970-80s issues of Burda Moden, first in pencil and later in a mix of pencil and gouache Since then, Little’s paintings have matured into their own independent realities, though they retain the nostalgic style of pre-Raphaelite daze and editorial torpor Distinct as lockets yet seductive as voids, all are masterly examples of perfumed paralysis   In Untitled (Wood) (2019), three young women lounge in grass near a fern-strewn wood Here, time is modulated Each figure belongs to their own era, shown in profile so their alternate perspectives never meet The girl on the right in a 1970s buttercup knit holds a recorder, in allusion to folk traditions popular during the period The middle girl clasps her basket of reaped possessions: conkers, blackberries, heaps of hazelnuts, navy and