Overview
There lies the deepest freshness deep down things Gerard Manley Hopkins
At a time when much contemporary art is characterised by coolly distanced irony, etiolated conceptualism and a scathing disregard for sensuous painterliness, it is exhilarating to encounter the works of three colourists of subtle vibrancy and a flaring expressionism: William Crozier (1930-2011), Albert Irvin (b.1922) and Lucy Jones (b.1955). These artists have in common a raw spontaneity and freshness of seeing, expressed through heightened acuity of colour and an acute sensitivity to the possibilities of mobile mark-making which has a magical improvisatory edginess to it. Their pictures are rooted in a dynamically spacious navigation of place - even Bert Irvin's abstract paintings, which he says are 'never depictive and not relived experiences in any particular way', musically conjure up, as it were, the quotidian jostling urbanity of making his way to the studio each morning.
