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INTRODUCTION

Exhibition catalogue introductions are usually characterised by the most outrageous hyperbole in which critic X shamelessly exaggerates the ability and stature of artist Y, to stultifying effect for both. So often one feels as though the writer is being paid in proportion to the frequency of superlatives and flattering references used. The merits of the artist, who is of course quite incapable of placing a brush mark even slightly awry, are screamed at anyone prepared to lend eye and ear. With only a few exceptions what is written in catalogue introductions can be safely dismissed as special pleading and, like any other dead convention, ignored. If the work is any good you'll be able to see it from the illustrations, so why not let them speak for themselves. I intend to do that here — well almost anyway — because the work's qualities are perfectly obvious and the artist's direction plain.

When I was asked to contribute here at first I replied no. Apart from any other considerations I'm ashamed to have to admit now that I'd never heard of Stuart Luke Gatherer. Then I was sent some photographs, which intrigued me sufficiently to visit the actual paintings, whose refinements it turned out were, unusually, misrepresented by reproduction: the opposite is normally the case in contemporary painting, where work is flattered by expensive illustrations. The contrast in Gatherer's pictures, always striking because he is a painter of staged drama, are less strident in the paintings than their photographs, and his smaller pictures are subtler still.

What impresses me about his paintings? His ambition is closely adjacent to impertinence: for my own part, I love this bold aggression. He has set his sights no higher than wanting to match the Old Masters, whose works not only inform his own but often feature in them. If, like me, you en joy the self-congratulation resulting from games of art-historical I-Spy, stylistic echoes are also there for you to find. Gatherer works towards producing pictures which will appeal to those who follow and relish good painting for its own sake. There is no point in trying to explain this, except that the pleasure of seeing a studied observation translated with economy and invention into paint is its own reward. Either you like it or you don't, and I do. In the staged tableaux, where the painter uses a kind of repertory comp any of players, the focus is not so much on narrative as on the charged atmosphere, usually some form of anxiety or tension, existing between people who seem familiar to one another but nonetheless uncertain or vulnerable. I am equally impressed and heartened by the fact that Gatherer en joys the action of painting. He is challenged by the medium and, increasingly, he succeeds in making it do his bidding.

This painter has been out of college for only five years and, looking back, his advances are considerable. It is very reassuring to witness his facility develop with almost every painting. In the same way that over the years one picks up writers to follow and admire, I have added Stuart Luke Gatherer to the list of artists whose work, from now on, I will seek out.

David Lee, Editor The Jackdaw