Ellis’s work deals with the mechanisms of culture production. “Received modes and styles of working, stolen ideas, copies and replays of cultural moments are as real to me as anything else. The strategies of blow-up, monochrome, rip-off and repetition are really just all ways of pursuing this one basic aim to produce a work that exists independently of me,” Ellis explains. The Dogs is a blow-up of a small, full-colour oil painting that Ellis made combining a found image and a landscape he painted from life in 1998. By stripping the image of colour and enlarging it to monumental proportions Ellis aggrandises the crudeness and banality of the subject and reinvests these attributes with power and importance.