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Introduction
by
Brian
Sewell
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Art
Critic of The
London Evening Standard
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I
very rarely write introductions to the catalogues of
exhibitions, and if I do so,
it is without personal involvement and for no fee. I
voluntarily put my shoulder to the wheel and that is
that. Such introductions are, of course, jam on the
critic`s gingerbread and a form of back-scratching
to
mutual benefit.They are an art
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form
in themselves; the art is in saying nothing that commits the
writer and yet has the air of undiluted flattery,for nothing
must be allowed to embarrass the critic as an error of judgement
if the artist wanders away from the expected path; the art
is in finding forms of words that are no more than wind and
waffle, a variant of politician - speak that seems full of
genuine praise and adulation, but on close examination is
found to mean absolutely nothing; and the mendacious craft
of the introduction lies in deftly raising the ghosts of great
painters of the past and weaving the names of, say, Velazquez,
Melendez, Chardin and Vermeer into the argument, implying
by their presence that the painter who is the subject of the
essay is one of their number and their equal.
000000Such introductions are
unfair to both the young painter and to those who buy his
pictures. Buy his pictures they should , if they like them,
if they want to set eyes on them every day at different times
of day and in different seasons of the year - for good pictures
respond to such changed circumstances,grow mysterious, gain
clarity,seem warmer or cooler according to the colour of the
light, softer in edge or more suffused in colour - all this
is true in McAllister's still lives, as I know well from the
expedience of living with one - and in this the house of the
private owner has a wonderful advantage over the fixed, and
often bleak, conditions of the puplic gallery.Buy his pictures
they should because something in the image touches them with
sentiment or quiet familiarity, because they perceive in them
some quality of stillness,some intellectual wit or mathematics
given form, some evidence of an eye that sees so much more
than those who do not
paint that it induces in the spectator a fierce urge to share
in such clear, surreal or hallucinatory vision..Buy his pictures
they should, but not because he is promoted as heir to a great
past and thus, by specious implication, will be a great painter
of the future with all that involves in terms of world record
sales at the far end of the century.
000000 I am intrested in McAllister
because I see him as a young painter not yet fully formed,
whose enquiry into things that interest him is persistent
and probing, as a painter whose perception grows steadily
more intense and who deliberately trains his hand to keep
pace with it, but never to outrun it so that a picture becomes
a spiritually empty tour-de-force.I am interested in him because
he is that increasingly rare phenomenon, a painter who knows
how to paint and does so with immaculate integrity. He uses
his skill on sotto voce performances that will for ever be
unheard in the echoing caverns of Tate Modern but which, like
so many other painters whose still lives have over the past
three centuries pleased their collectors with subtle insights
into form, light and compostion, depend on the private and
discerning eye for the survival of the genre. |
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