Ocom’s lovely portrait of his wife Maureen is a wonderful example of the artist’s gift. Executed mostly with a palette knife in the impasto style Ocom has been developing recently, the piece accurately depicts the sitter’s timeless beauty. Ocom said he had his wife sit down from time to time in order to make this picture, and as he worked he sometimes asked their first-born son if, indeed, it was his mother he saw when he glimpsed the canvas. It was she, of course. This collector was drawn also to the intoxicating injection of purple in the woman’s dress, a color that accentuates the picture’s force.
