Colour Keeler is the result of a commission by curator and friend to Fowler, James Birch. Fowler became fascinated by Christine Keeler’s dramatic rise to public attention in the 1960s — that of a suburban girl who moved to London in the hope of becoming a model, and found herself credited with the downfall of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government. When Keeler’s affair with the married cabinet minister John Profumo, as well as a simultaneous affair with a Soviet diplomat, became public knowledge, the British press and public exhibited a conflicted response: moral outrage at supposed sexual profligacy co-existed with an avid consumption of the affair’s lurid details. This work is a rare example of Fowler working in colour, which here serves to embellish and intensify Keeler’s already enlarged presence in the drawing. Her cut-out figure steps out from the paper’s surface, dwarfing those that surround her on the beach. The radiance of her sexual power as a femme fatale, revealed and intensified, sees her separated from the background of normality into a world of supposition, intrigue and scandal.