Tom Phillips, Sylvia Sumira, 1987

Sitter: Sylvia Sumira, globe conservator

Medium/Date: Oil on canvas, 1987

Artist's note:

Sylvia is the world's sole specialist conservator of globes and together we have made the three Humument Globes. I first drew her in 1984.

This portrait (as well as another, painted in 1988) refers to her unusual sphere of activity. It shows her against an improvised start chart featuring Pisces her birth sign and other allusions to her name and mine.

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