Since he began his career as an artist, Opie has been concerned with expanding his artistic means of expression, and at an early stage he deliberately crossed the genre boundaries between painting and sculpture. In this piece, elements from comic strips and Pop Art have become placed centre stage, whilst tackling the traditional subject matter of the 'side-on portrait'. As such, Opie breaks away from the classic forms and genres of art and finding a different medium as well as another language and means of reading the artwork. The unmistakable pictorial language that this piece consists of has the effect of reducing the individual features of the human figure to a few lines or basic outlines to create a simple, pictogram-style portrait.