By late 1999, Chris Gollon had switched mainly to working in acrylic on canvas rather than panel, and also stopped varnishing his paintings. David Hockney and Francis Bacon had been criticised for flatness when using acrylic; but Gollon started to develop a technique to prevent this, by painting from dark to light. This meant he would first make the underpainting in a form of grisaille, simply using black and white paint. He would then add layers and layers of thin washes or glazes, before painting back in the highlights with white. He was basically importing into the modern medium of acrylic, an Old Master technique, but then adding certain printmaking techniques to remove the pigment, such as throwing water at the canvas in specific areas, or using the wrong end of the brush to scratch in and remove paint to make the lines he needed. The latter he learned making monotypes at the Glasgow Print Studio in 1996.

Thanks to this image, Chris Gollon was commissioned to paint his highly-acclaimed Fourteen Stations of the Cross for the Grade I listed Church of St John on Bethnal Green, designed by Sir John Soane. It was seen by Fr Alan Green at IAP Fine Art, when based in Bethnal Green in 1999. He was very taken with the image, since the Stations of the Cross in St John's (ceramic reproductions of works by Eric Gill) had all been smashed by a vandal, and he was looking for a replacement as an active aid to worship. Fr Alan Green speaks about the moment he saw this painting in the 2024 documentary 'CHRIS GOLLON: Life in Paint'.

'The Penitent Magdalene (After Titian)' is featured in art historian Tamsin Pickeral’s biography ‘Chris Gollon: Humanity in Art’ (2010):

"Although ostensibly religious in subject matter, the work was more significantly a searching reflection on human emotion, and bears little obvious religious imagery. Gollon was drawn to the specific subject matter, that of the fallen woman who seeks, and is granted, redemption – a woman whose express weakness and overriding strength is worn as a mantle – and subsequently returned to it, painting a number of penitent and pre-penitent Magdalenes such as the striking Magdalene with Candle (2002) and Pre-Penitent Magdalene (2003). Titian, whose work Gollon greatly admires, also painted this subject at least seven times including Penitent Magdalene (c. 1555-1565). Titian’s Magdalene paintings were intended to be contemplative devotionals and were received with great enthusiasm, lauded by his now-famous contemporary, the biographer, artist and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574). In considering the paintings, however, it is clear that Titian struck a delicate balance between piety and salaciousness with his Magdalenes. They depict a woman with tear-streaked cheeks and heaving breasts either gasping with angst at her moral and spiritual crimes, or feasibly crying out with breathless ecstasy. Her beauty and attributes though covered demurely by her arm in a gesture that Gollon loosely copies were surely designed to appeal as much to the physical senses as to the spiritual soul of Renaissance man. Gollon’s Magdalene, in this instance, bears no such obvious classic beauty, but she is raw and achingly honest, with artifice and aesthetics drawn aside to reveal a soul laid bare; she is in essence all that it is to be human where profligacy battles morality, and hope shadows despair.”