Stuart Luke Gatherer These are paintings of a world seldom seen in modern an. The people in them are mostly young. That's no great surprise. But they are smartly-dressed and seem well-to-do. "Why should I paint dock-workers, or young drug addicts?", asks the artist. "I don't know anything about those people. I paint people I know and can relate to". Take The Cellar. It might be a still from a Disney film, but one with attitude. Something's gone wrong for these glossy, cool young things. "I wanted to create a seedy underworld" says Gatherer, "it's no t alluded to in an obvious way. The narrative is left up to the onlooker. The painting is a nod toward a painting by Willem Drost, a pupil of Rembrandt, in the Wallace Collection in London ." This is typical of the artist. Like many of the bright young representational painters of our time, he is devoted to the classical tradition and sees it as an endless source of affectionate jokes, and sly references. Born in Lincolnshire , the artist is now 27 but spent most of his boyhood in Scotland , where he studied art history and painting in a joint course at Edinburgh University and the College of An. Though the college was in what he calls "brown abstract mode", he struck out and stuck out for figurative painting. His peers were surprised by his interest in depicting clean-cut young people, and especially people in formal dress. That preoccupation continues, as we can see in The Optimism of Contemporary Life (which looks alarmingly like the team photograph of some city broker, the Flaming Ferraris perhaps). But it is at its clearest in The Card, in which young people who might be in Oxfam formal wear for a university ball, or be genuine Scottish baronials are caught in... in what? These are paintings in which a story we needn't know has been interrupted. Some important player has often just left the stage. Something important is under discussion, but we needn't know what. These are "proper" paintings. They have texture. They have the brilliant, exposing, rather brutal illumination of Degas. They speak of a man who says he admires the showy craftsmanship of Sargent (and he sees the edge and depth in the swagger man's works, which is less spoken of). In Gatherer's hands, oils show us the moussed, spiky hair, the adolescent glossiness, the late night unkemptness, of his favoured characters. But his are also deliberately implacable images: this is oil used to create an almost celluloid sheen. They are images which combine the Old Master with the cinema. |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||||||||