Do Not Disturb My Sleep

In Do Not Disturb My Sleep, Tomlinson reworks the motif of The Nymph at the Fountain, as developed in early sixteenth-century paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop. These works depict a reclining nude in a pastoral landscape accompanied by a Latin inscription warning the viewer not to disturb her sleep, a prohibition that sits uneasily alongside the figure’s composed, outward-facing gaze. In Tomlinson’s painting, this tension between refusal and display is retained but displaced into a forested pond setting. The nymph reclines at ease within the landscape, returning the viewer’s gaze with calm indifference. Smoking a Vogue cigarette languidly, she uses it to set the surrounding foliage alight.

As fire spreads through the forest, consuming the pastoral setting around her, she remains entirely untroubled. The work shifts the historical dynamic of Cranach’s image away from passive spectacle, reimagining the figure as one who neither seeks protection from the gaze nor submits to it, but instead occupies a state of controlled, detached agency. Rather than remaining an object of looking, she turns against the world that produces her, allowing the landscape to collapse through indifference and excess. Attention and destruction unfold without urgency, but they are no longer neutral conditions: they become the means through which the image undoes itself. In refusing to remain an object for viewing, the figure pushes the logic of spectacle to its limit, where the act of looking, the space it depends on, and the world it constructs disintegrate together.