This painting shows Alice actually going through the looking glass and emerging through the other side at the same time. The composition is based on Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations to Lewis Carroll's wonderful book, but I found that the pose Tenniel put his Alice into was in real life impossible. My daughter's friend Naomi dressed up in an old party dress to pose for the painting, and I think she is more like the real Alice (Alice Liddell) than the girl Tenniel drew. Alice is penetrating for a moment into the brighter reality that exists just beyond the surface of our ordinary preoccupations.
