4
A Painter’s Painter
The ferocious reaction against the prevailing 19th century art that Picasso and co
unleashed in the early 20th century is needed now against the 20th century. Just as the
lead up to the First World War and the war itself defined the 20th century, our great
depression disaster is defining the present century, sweeping away the fictitious values
of ‘securities’ and rubbishy ‘art’.
The art of the new century must, in order to reject the trivialisation of the last century,
be about gimmick-free form and structure that avoids formula. The struggle to find
representational form that is not a dreary return to the past is most likely to produce
radical contrast to the re-hashing of the stale devices of the previous century. These
paintings are an expression of a belief that the new art can arise from the
uncompromising values of the life room.
It is symptomatic of our politically debased and game/tv reality show culture that formal
and spatial values in figurative art have become dirty words – art, like society, has no
depth and surface is all. Contemporary use of bright cheerful colour by collapsing the
tonal range as if only playing two octaves on an eight-octave keyboard is also part of this
trivialisation.
I was fortunate in the sixties to be taught by some of the last of the old guard RA and RP
members for whom form and stucture were the probity of art. This has enabled me to
