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This painting began with a line from David Bowie’s I Dig Everything:
“I feed the lions in Trafalgar Square.”
If it’s good enough for Bowie to sing, I thought, it’s certainly good enough to paint.

The image is surreal to begin with—David Bowie feeding those great bronze lions—but I felt the story would grow stranger, softer, and more open to wonder if the feeder wasn’t Bowie at all, or even a grown-up, but a child. A little girl, with all the innocence and curiosity that adults can no longer convincingly carry.

In my version, she balances on a ladder, a single round balloon gripped in one hand while the other offers raw meat to the enormous, silent lion. She leans forward just enough to feel the pull of gravity, that small thrill of risk before the world catches her. It’s a gesture both brave and tender—an offering made to something that will never reach back.

The balloon becomes her tether to childhood—fragile, weightless, absurdly bright against the sky. She clings to it as if it carries the logic of the whole scene, as if without it, the act would stop making sense entirely.

Why is she doing this? Is it kindness? Curiosity? A private ritual that no one else can decipher? The lions themselves—silent and unyielding—hardly need feeding. Yet here she is, performing a gesture that feels at once natural and impossible, like stepping into someone else’s dream.

To capture that atmosphere, I leaned into the surreal: soft pastels, a palette of muted blues and rose mid-tones, letting the whole scene hover in that space between waking and dream. Real enough to imagine happening. Unreal enough to feel like a memory someone else had for you.

In the end, the painting isn’t about feeding lions at all. It’s about the quiet, unspoken contracts we make with the impossible—the small gestures we offer to a world that only half-notices.