Building on the traditions of portraiture, I reappropriate mass-mediated images into gestural paintings. Drawn from a range of popular cultural sources including fashion magazines, my work critically engages with the discourse surrounding the cult of celebrity in contemporary society. I look at the effect of fame by considering the anonymous faces surrounding the celebrity. This might be the individual in a crowd or the model advertising a celebrated branded product. The unknown person is elevated from the mundane to the status of icon through paint. In only superficially adhering to the photographic source, I allow the randomness of the brush strokes to bring out the personality of the subject that was superfluous to the intentions of the mediated image that they were drawn from.