Barrington Tobin | Concord

Those who have followed Barrington Tobin's work over the past thirty years will have seen in it a growing freedom of paint, mark and gesture and with it a greater unity or concentration in his images. The result is a more powerful impact yet also a subtler, more deep-going resonance. Painting, though, is a material thing and not least of the pleasures to be savoured in looking at a Tobin close-up is a varied texture of fine Belgian canvas primed with white then overlaid with pigment, gently or powerfully brushed in, as well as instinctive, often surprising, colour harmonies and confrontations. Not all painters, by any means, provide this sensuous delight (one can think of 'major' artists who do not). Another very attractive feature of Tobin's work, for all its seriousness, is its pervasive humour, whether in the choice of such a title as Red Ants Sunbathing or, more subversively, in small, not immediately noticed but highly significant, touches within the pictorial 'statement' itself. 

 What can words usefully do? One can speak (as I have) of colour-shapes, brush marks and the textures pof canvas and paint, or of the importance of format, dimensions, ratios. But, as Braque said long ago: "In art there is only one thing that matters - the bit you can't explain." And that bit is the artist's expression of his experience, which can only be transmitted to the viewer wordlessly through the eyes.

- Peter Khoroche