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Hung by Christopher Le Brun, Tony Bevan and Stephen Farthing, this room is alive with the incendiary power of two apocalyptic paintings by Jeffery Camp. ‘The older you get, the wilder you become,’ comments Bevan, and Camp handles his crazily swirling pigment with gusto.
John Bellany RA, 'Eyemouth'. Oil, 172 x 172 cm. Photo: John Bodkin/DawkinsColour Vitality of a very different kind animates David Mach’s collaged photo-piece called Liquidation. Figures undulate beneath the water, contrasting with Mach’s other exhibit, in which four heads reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe turn out to be made of matchsticks.
The power of words is explored in Miranda Argyle’s Heartbeat, made with silk on linen. White capital letters spelling out the work’s title are repeated all the way down, without a break, generating inventive word-play. And words also play a small part in John Bellany’s vigorous painting of Eyemouth, where fishing boats are moored next to the Whale Hotel. The dramatic sky above is streaked with red, while Bellany heaps the foreground with a jug, children’s toys and other, less identifiable forms.
His freely handled approach contrasts with that of Anthony Green, whose exemplary precision can be relished in such paintings as Three Vases of Montbretia and A Vase of Ceanothus. But Leonard McComb’s painting of trees in south London emphasises their pale elongation. They look as vulnerable as the buildings in Jock McFadyen’s Dagenham, in which a bleak grey landscape is interrupted by a long row of tiny terraced houses ranged across the distant horizon.
