This painting takes its title and partial inspiration from The Beatles’ song ‘Fool on the Hill’ (written by Paul McCartney, released on the EP ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, 1967). It follows Chris Gollon’s ‘Basement Tapes’ series of monotypes (2007), his preferred printmaking method, and shows clearly his mastery of black. In matt black acrylic, thickly applied, the broken end of the fretboard seems almost sculptural, yet the body of the guitar is made by a ‘scratching-in’ technique, a removal of paint, the reverse process the artist used in making monotypes. Gollon also imports a further print-making device into this work, with the use of a hard printmaker’s roller on the sky, hinting at an impossible mountain range behind the rising moon, which adds to the image’s mystery. As art historian Tamsin Pickeral notes in her 2010 biography of Chris Gollon, ‘Humanity in Art’: “Gollon blurred the genre of still life and landscape, a technique which he used increasingly through 2006 and 2007, seen in […] works such as ‘Fool on the Hill’ […] giving inanimate objects tremendous human character”.