Folk

Below are a few of the artists whose approaches to image-making I am finding most interesting at the moment. Mostly they are peers of mine working in and around Edinburgh, namely Alex Gibbs, Bernie Reid, Callum Montieth ( all members and/or co-founders of Superclub studios) and printmaker and illustrator Liam Golden whose MFA work is showing at the eca degree shows at present. To compensate for image theft, their websites follow thusly : http://www.superclubstudios.com/ , http://www.skinnydip.co.uk/skinny/illustration/bernie-reid/artworks/, http://www.alex-gibbs.com/, http://www.callummonteith.com, http://liamgolden.com 

Also in there are Charles Avery and Edvard Munch. I should also like to add to this group the work of Balthus and another  graduating artist  exhibiting in this year's eca Drawing and Painting degree shows Liam Walker  whose suites of minute watercolour and ink 'cartoons' (arranged in domino-game groupings)  were the most memorable and understated works I saw. Unfortunately no images of his work are available online yet.   

What I find most compelling about these works is how they reveal internal worlds and create spaces, landscapes and scenarios which feel impossibly familiar as though the images belong to some sort of shared dream-space or collective subconscious. They just work. With the exception of Avery (who makes explicit the mechanics of his universe through text and maps) these pieces all feel like they  could be windows onto earths very similar to our own. Somewhere where a narrative or internal logic is in operation but which remains unspecified.  

The way in which figures appear in these spaces (Reid, Munch, Balthus, Golden) often alone, central or distant; their forms are implied, totemic or reappear in different works which gives them a real potency. Alternatively, at times, these are images in which nothing very much is going on ( Walker, Gibbs, Golden). They are remarkable for their unremarkableness, (in terms of content); A poetic, gentle kind of desolation. Like Alex Katz's works which capture 'dramatically indeterminate and low-key events' they open up this possibility that anything and everything can be the subject for a painting and it is something of this sort of approach would be welcome into my practice after years of my painting being concerned with selection and editing- arguably to the exclusion of poetry.

I have to conclude that images derived from the imagination and filtered through memory have far greater potency then any kind of mimetic painting can hope to achieve. Unfettered by over-determined statements of intent, they represent symbolic communication at its most subtle and direct