Clive Head was born in 1965 in Maidstone, Kent. He studied initially at Maidstone Grammar School and later at the University of Aberystwyth, from which he graduated with a degree in Fine Art. Here he was tutored by David Tinker, an eminent abstract painter working in Wales, whose own work and teaching Head would later be re-inspired by. Upon completion of his degree, and a short period of postgraduate study at Lancaster University, Head began exhibiting his work at Colin Jellicoe Gallery in Manchester and with art dealer Nicholas Treadwell.

Head has questioned the relevance of a realism based on a single moment in time when we now record everything that we encounter with a constant stream of photographs, often just snapped on our smartphones. A contemporary photorealism must take account of this mass of imagery and recognise that we are not in an era where photography means setting up a plate camera and taking one optimum image. Such thinking has contributed to Head's departure from a static realism.

The transformative figures in The Cherry Train extend from seated figures simultaneously standing and striding through a doorway of a train seen in perspective on the right, to a balletic figure flying from that same doorway across the painting. The large standing figure in the centre of the painting is constructed almost entirely of inanimate objects, such as the curving shapes of the airline seats. In painting it seems that all matter is open and it is simply the relationship between one shape and another that creates life. For Head, those shapes are often just a single brush mark of dense paint.