In the essay Frozen Landscape Peter Halley writes of portraiture as an attempt to defy mortality.

This is a portrait of my son at age 6. The composition and frequency are modeled closely after the Fayuum portraits of Egyptian antiquity. I find the fayuum portraits to be the most compelling and potent example of paintings ability to freeze someone at an exact moment in time. eliminating a distance or seperation between those long past, and myself.

The background is inlaid mother-of-pearl. Pearls, symbolically, have been used to represent transformation.