"Mood 8" presents, in cool monochrome blue, a tightly cropped row of "vitamin water" bottles whose labels and advertising texts dominate the picture field. Through the combination of screenprint, oil, and acrylic, photographic sharpness and painterly blur overlap into a peculiarly floating effect. Alan Michael thus condenses the language of advertising into an almost meditative pictorial reflection on consumption and desire. The Scottish painter Alan Michael probes the mechanisms of image and consumer culture, combining painting with the strategies of reproduction; his works have been shown, among other places, at Tate Britain in London. This large-format unique work was created in 2010.