Four responses to works in the exhibition Horse Gossip: Libertine (3)

With its light, astringent colour, Libertine is free-flowing, unconstrained: the work of someone in touch with their essential self. Its freshness and cleanness strike you every time you look at it; everything about it is both spontaneous and exact. But what can be said about it in a relevant way? Even the colour is hard to describe: a diluted reddish/ochre or sienna, that appears quickly brushed over wet raw canvas, though ‘brushed’ doesn’t seem the right word for this delicate veil of colour, down which some grains of semi-dissolved pigment bleed. Right on the lower corner there’s a little semicircular cusp of reserved canvas – how did it get there? The whole painting seems to depend on it. Near the top margin is a long horizontal white brushstroke – both spontaneous and exactly placed; the painting depends on that too. In fact in any painting that looks right, no matter what style or manner, everything is exact; nothing is superfluous, and nothing is lacking.

People are apt to dismiss this kind of painting - painting that seems to have so little in it; but in fact this little contains everything the work needs to succeed highly. In other words, slenderness of means doesn’t mean the work is slender as art at all. On the one hand, then, there’s this simplicity – and on the other, the vitality and life-affirmingness that spring from these very straightforward means. That’s the meaning I get from the work.

Alan Shipway

Alan Shipway is a painter living and working in Edinburgh. He studied History of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh (1974-1978) and attended the postgraduate Advanced Painting Course at St Martin’s School of Art in London (1978-1979).