Paintings and stuff

I was feeling a bit bloated about photography and I wandered into the Martin Tinney Gallery. This is a private art gallery I've heard of pretty positive reviews, and it's a nice large space. It's strange to check out paintings when what you do and see most of the time are photographs. It's a bit like surviving a year on documentaries and then watching two musicals in a row. I do wonder, though, how much the bluntness, and the twisting of reality that photography provide influence my taste in painting. Most of it was tremendously boring: landscapes, more landscapes, some portraits, a nude. Very few non figurative work actually, and of the little there was, I could not judge on its merit (didn't really make an impression).

I did really like some work, though.

Darren Hughes had up a number of very bleak landscapes. The dark tones, and often the extremely large fields of view resembled panoramic photographs. They were a depressing but beautiful view of the valleys. Lots of rain and fog on top of the hills.







Kevin Sinnott was my favourite, though. Interesting compositions of town life with some contemporary twists here and there, like a painting of a chap free running up a bus stop with some girls watching, or a country scene by a house that randomly happens to have naked figures in one of the groupings. I've not been able to find either one of these online, so I'll show some other of his pieces. Once again, I'm afraid I could see the first one of these being a scene shot with a Mamiya 7.







To further dig into the paralelism with the photography world, I thought that the work of Sally Moore deeply resembled things that you could find in Flickr Explore. Some sort of pop crowdpleasing. Maybe I'm just a very boring guy.