All images © Delia Brown 2013

For an exhibition at Il Capricorno gallery in Venice, Italy -perhaps the most romantic city in the world - Brown wanted to make images of an idealized love affair, so she set out to cast her dream mate by writing to her celebrity crushes at the time, asking if they’d participate by posing for photos (which she’d then make into paintings). When she received rejection letters from the agents of Benicio Del Toro and the like, she turned to the idea of a romantic meditation on loneliness, and lyrical imagery inspired by Pre-Raphaelite depictions of Hamlet’s Ophelia, the Platonic forsaken lover.

The exhibition comprised diminutive, intimate, oils and watercolors.