Andy, these are a real success. It is hard to judge them in relation to the majority of your other work as they stand alone. They don’t seem to fit directly into the your main line of progress. In this sense they are like the two portraits you did, in that they have more autonomy as ‘products’.

This si not to say I don’t see link with your other work. It is also not suggesting I see the rest of your practise as homogenous in type or function. It is just these two feel like a necessary deviation.

The interplay of your paintings to original photographic sources is a continuous aspect of your work. But the more direct transaltion evident in the above work creates far more singuarly mimetic problems.

Without wishing to dillute subtleties it obviously pushes this into a realm which we might call more ‘traditional’ forms of landscape picture making. Obviously the relation to photogrepahy as a medium between cavnas and land renders it into a more specific field of associations.

This sounds like waffle but it is a preamble to explain why i think this means you have a different sets of problems to deal with here. On the one hand certain narrative and analytic complexities have been removed. But in reducing your challneges down it is obvioulsy far more easy to move towards the pictureque, the pretty, the vacuous. You have not done this.  

What raises this picture above that is a few things. Firstly I think the sourcing of the source material has a certain rightness. It has been found not searched for. It has forced itself upon you. It is close to being fairly conventional but the angle and compostion create a tension, that kind of throwaway snapshot which has the sense of the contemplative. The unstaged pause if you like. I think this is really hard to find.

Beyond this thought its greatest strength is in the technical merit of the painting. You have surpassed yourself. There are patches in many of your previous works which have left me jealous and delighted. The green in ‘Charity’, some of the glazing in ‘The Bankers’ (III I think), aspects of the flesh in your two portraits of your Aunt and Gran, the colour in ‘The Kiss’ (if the names right) etc etc. Yet this has total balance. Tihs works all over and has a sophisitication that I think, on first glance at a digital image, goes beyond any of them. This has surely come from the reduction of your problems, as well I am sure from the new paths opened up by the spray gun.

Anyway: you seem to show control of surface and cololur and a new range of tone perhaps not apparnt in most of your other work.

I think this work has a quiet poetry to it. The addition of the ballons is, of course, in danger of being cliched, but the formal plays seem to ensure this is avoided. Its a really tender painting. I love it.

What is interesting is then viewing the ’sketch’ below. I think this is starts to sit itself on a boundary which I know many of the artists you like position themselves on. That kind of Hodgkin desire for the sophisitication of the crude mark.

Some of the passages of paint have a wonderful duality. They are so clearly just bits of paint hastily whacked onto a piece of paper. Yet then they are also so effective in fulfilling their mimetic role of describing landscape; to the point that there could almost be a photographic feel to parts. Photographic in terms of that kind of casual shot out of a train. I want to see this one in the flesh in the hope it does not disapoint me. I know the other one won’t.

I want to be more constructive and temper my praise with criticism. The only thing I can think to criticise is that perhaps the lack of much to criticise shows the pictures up for having less to tackle and deconstruct than many of your others. I have no idea if this is a bad thing.

What I do know is that I am excited to see how some of the lessons (if thats the correct word) from these works transfer into your next body of images. When more layers of meaning and complexity are added back in, will the painterly qualities of these images survive.