The iconic 'maverick of parody', artist Dick Frizzell has enjoyed a long and varied career. He is an artist who plays by his own rules. Known primarily for his pop art style and graphic edge, Frizzell continues to break trends in works that frequently blur the boundaries between high and low art. There is an on-going sense of irony and humour within Frizzell's oeuvre as depicted in this playful yet provocative work. The Sailor Returns is a parody of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which is often celebrated as the cornerstone of Modernism and the birth of Cubism. It depicts five women of Barcelona, and was a deliberate breaking away from the classical rendering of female nudes in high art. Frizzell's work skillfully integrates properties of the Cubist aesthetic with his own language of object and colour, to construct a compelling composition celebrating the centenary of Les Demoiselles. The earliest sketches of Picasso's work feature two men inside the brothel: one a sailor and the other a medical student. Frizzell chooses to reintroduce the sailor giving him and the two central nudes comic book facial features reminiscent of his comic book Cubism of the 1970s. A major point of difference in The Sailor Returns is the introduction of Polynesian overtones, with the left-hand figure dressed in a lava-lava and Picasso's African and Iberian masks replaced with a Maori tiki and a distinctly Polynesian mask.