The conception for they passed with noses in the air came from two directions. First, the poem - King John's Christmas, by A A Milne has been a part of my life and has been in my head since early childhood. The title of this painting comes from it. On the other side, I like to look at black and white photographs of people and use those photos as source material for practicing color portraiture. While doing this I ran across a photo of a group of men in top hats in a car. Also, I stumbled across a photo of lady in a huge hat. Each of them had an expression of "I'm so much better than everybody else that I need not concern myself with them or their doings", I wanted to put them together somehow. I reversed the orientation of the man, put a different hat on the woman, gave them both bodies and different clothes and then set about constructing a background. They just seemed to naturally fit in to a landscape of destruction and devastation. So I painted it and here it is
