A New Voyage to the North Sea

I have a small painting given to me by Gregor Wright hanging on my living room wall. Titled ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’ it is an uncannily distinct painting despite the rudimentary figuration. A disembodied grinning face with luminous yellow eyes, framed by swirling ultramarine blues, greens and greys is pressed up against the upper edge of the painting as if looking down from a great height. This vertiginous feeling is enhanced by the way in which the features of the face in fact seem to be comprised of the paintings ground, a layer of acid yellow paint applied underneath the turbulent layers of dark oceanic hues. Thus the feeling of vertigo imbued by the painting becomes akin to looking down into a deep watery pool, blank pupil less eyes staring back from the depths. The macabre grin and the fact that the left eye is partly occluded by a smear of dark paint in a ghostly wink only add to the feeling that this is an image of a return from a watery grave. The pointy upper boundary of the face, perhaps the hair, a hat or sou-wester, separates the face from the stormy swirls of paint surrounding it via a strange turquoise peak that reminds me of the chattering anthropomorphic flames that inhabit recent Scottish gas adverts.

The strange turquoise flame motif, the ghostly presence of a drowned mariner, and the turbulent storm of painterly marks which cunningly reverse the roles of figure and ground combine in ways that manage to be both romantic and ridiculous. They speak to me of a knowing watchfulness from beyond the grave, a ghostly awareness of the risks and rewards of harnessing energies from beyond the edge. Equally they communicate a sense of wondrous absurdity that a painter might have managed whilst painting, to invoke the spirit of these things at all.

This is a typical recent work of Wright, combining in strange synthesis oppositions and sophisticated improvisations whose naivety (my mother mistook the painting for a drawing by my six year old niece) is beautifully academic. It is shot through with imagination. It has a profoundly intelligent, sensitive and canonically astute combination of a love of the intuitive manipulation of the outer edges of painterly representation and a coolly analytical eye for visual complexity.

I love it.