Maybe online, or from instagram these paintings look like mere photo-transcriptions, they aren’t at all.

Mike paints with a thinly loaded brush, building images in one inch pulls, the paint dries almost to a powdery pure pigment, and the surface is touched all over like a kind of patchwork. As the painting conjures the space (the gap?) between the document (the photo) and the memory, there’s so much possibility for invention, for improvising, for problem-solving.

He is wonderful with colour too, not so much colours as if faded in the light, but colours that have absorbed so much light that they hum from the inside. Look at those greens and pinks through the window.

The other thing Mike is brilliant with is still life arrangements of 2 objects that seem intrinsic to each other and yet are simply the casual consequence of domesticity. See the show and look at the fax machine with the drooping long-leaved pot plant , or the iron with the trifasciata.

It isn’t their finding of the extraordinary within the ordinary - a poetry of the everyday (a commonplace whimsy beloved by some), it is the simultaneity of a moment of extraordinary (of poise, or connectedness) AND the inescapable, untranscendable ordinariness. It is the hope of a metaphoric transportation entwined with brute material stuff-ness.

In our everyday lives, a mug or a watering can can become weighted with the significance of a loved one once that person has left. Those objects can’t do that in painting, especially when looked at by others. In painting their extra potency is not achieved by projection or nostalgia (brought about by loss), painting charges a dynamic between things through light and proximity and shape conjured from the continuum of similar painting-touches. It is from within the mat of like touches that the possibility emerges for the two mute things, in relation, to become both object and allegory.