Alison Mulroy 'Stories'
Charthusian Magazine
One of Alison Mulroy’s paintings offers three views of Peter Monkman; we consider his head in profile, facing forward (but with his gaze slightly averted), and from behind – an excellent view of the back of his neck. All three heads are immediately familiar, growing out of a scrubby, scribbled-over surface, giving a sense of the mercurial, crumpled, energized sitter. That surface, with its drips and stains, and penciled gestures towards descriptions of clothes left unpainted, is untypical, but the painting as a whole is characteristic because the artist is so conscious of the choices to be made. While many of the sitters here are striking – and strikingly beautiful – what makes the exhibition is the artist’s sheer pleasure in composition in its fullest sense. She has a brilliant eye for visual rhymes – in one painting, the arching swell of the eyelid echoes the upper lip, both picking up on the broad arc of the light falling on a rounded shoulder, or of the forearm just below the elbow. As a result, what might be a rather static, stilted image, (after all, the girl looks off dreamily, chin rested on a horizontal arm, in a rich, tranquil, cream light) has a beautiful dynamism. For me, the most striking images here tend to be images of women’s faces, rather larger than life size, and resembling, at first sight, old photographic snapshots. I say old, not because there is anything sepia about them, but because modern, self-adjusting cameras rarely juxtapose blinding white, over-exposed blanks with the sensuality of darker, grapey areas where full detail is suddenly restored. Now, we probably see most of our photographs on screen – and it’s easy to forget the glossy, luxurious sheen of our own pictures of loved ones, printed on paper; that sheen is evident here in a rich, deep, shining glaze. I’m making it sound as though these might be tedious, photo-realist rip-offs, pretentious substitutes for what one might achieve with a camera, but these are remarkable paintings, in which the bleaching out allows the strong lines of the design to dominate and animate: these images are often very immediate – as though we had suddenly, and for the first time, noticed that someone we knew was beautiful. Yet Mulroy’s control is such that her decision to pursue this line never becomes formulaic. In one canvas, the sitter’s chest is depicted as a flat, white continuation of the background around her head, contrasting with the black stripes of her top with perfect simplicity; the flatness of the design allows the subtly modelled flesh of the face to jump out at us – including the darkly shadowed eyes, which one would normally expect, in a more conventional painting, to lose themselves in their darkness. To say it has the immediacy of a snapshot is to undersell it: it’s like seeing someone in the white flash of a nuclear explosion. Next to it, there is a close-up portrait of a red-head’s face (presumably a self-portrait) in which the only bleached element is the face itself, framed by luscious hair. Much of one side of the face can be read as simple absence – leaving the blue-grey eyes as rather lonely, melancholy things – but actually the blankness is something of an illusion. There is an opalescent subtlety to the surface here, so that the viewer feels there is life and warmth under the chilly surface – and that the light is, somehow, coming from the face, rather than falling on to it. I could go on, of course; this is a diverse set of portraits of equally diverse sitters – from balding middle aged men to be-braced Removes, and from a greyish image of a bearded man to a golden, intimate self-portrait of a thoughtful face, glowing against a naked shoulder, which leaves you thinking of Vermeer. These are very skilful, very intelligent, very beautiful paintings.
Charles Hall, Master of the Scholars
Charthusian Magazine
One of Alison Mulroy’s paintings offers three views of Peter Monkman; we consider his head in profile, facing forward (but with his gaze slightly averted), and from behind – an excellent view of the back of his neck. All three heads are immediately familiar, growing out of a scrubby, scribbled-over surface, giving a sense of the mercurial, crumpled, energized sitter. That surface, with its drips and stains, and penciled gestures towards descriptions of clothes left unpainted, is untypical, but the painting as a whole is characteristic because the artist is so conscious of the choices to be made. While many of the sitters here are striking – and strikingly beautiful – what makes the exhibition is the artist’s sheer pleasure in composition in its fullest sense. She has a brilliant eye for visual rhymes – in one painting, the arching swell of the eyelid echoes the upper lip, both picking up on the broad arc of the light falling on a rounded shoulder, or of the forearm just below the elbow. As a result, what might be a rather static, stilted image, (after all, the girl looks off dreamily, chin rested on a horizontal arm, in a rich, tranquil, cream light) has a beautiful dynamism. For me, the most striking images here tend to be images of women’s faces, rather larger than life size, and resembling, at first sight, old photographic snapshots. I say old, not because there is anything sepia about them, but because modern, self-adjusting cameras rarely juxtapose blinding white, over-exposed blanks with the sensuality of darker, grapey areas where full detail is suddenly restored. Now, we probably see most of our photographs on screen – and it’s easy to forget the glossy, luxurious sheen of our own pictures of loved ones, printed on paper; that sheen is evident here in a rich, deep, shining glaze. I’m making it sound as though these might be tedious, photo-realist rip-offs, pretentious substitutes for what one might achieve with a camera, but these are remarkable paintings, in which the bleaching out allows the strong lines of the design to dominate and animate: these images are often very immediate – as though we had suddenly, and for the first time, noticed that someone we knew was beautiful. Yet Mulroy’s control is such that her decision to pursue this line never becomes formulaic. In one canvas, the sitter’s chest is depicted as a flat, white continuation of the background around her head, contrasting with the black stripes of her top with perfect simplicity; the flatness of the design allows the subtly modelled flesh of the face to jump out at us – including the darkly shadowed eyes, which one would normally expect, in a more conventional painting, to lose themselves in their darkness. To say it has the immediacy of a snapshot is to undersell it: it’s like seeing someone in the white flash of a nuclear explosion. Next to it, there is a close-up portrait of a red-head’s face (presumably a self-portrait) in which the only bleached element is the face itself, framed by luscious hair. Much of one side of the face can be read as simple absence – leaving the blue-grey eyes as rather lonely, melancholy things – but actually the blankness is something of an illusion. There is an opalescent subtlety to the surface here, so that the viewer feels there is life and warmth under the chilly surface – and that the light is, somehow, coming from the face, rather than falling on to it. I could go on, of course; this is a diverse set of portraits of equally diverse sitters – from balding middle aged men to be-braced Removes, and from a greyish image of a bearded man to a golden, intimate self-portrait of a thoughtful face, glowing against a naked shoulder, which leaves you thinking of Vermeer. These are very skilful, very intelligent, very beautiful paintings.
Charles Hall, Master of the Scholars