Joni's comments from the StarArt book: "After having done the series of eight paintings from photographs there was a tightness coming into my work, so [this and The Restaurant II] were an attempt to get looser. When I work from sketches the volume is left up to the imagination, whereas from photographs there is an imposition of hard edge because your subject is hard-edged. The brush stroke was becoming so incredibly careful that it was not an enjoyable process and the art was beginning to take itself too seriously..."