SLWA Showcase

Torie Wilkinson, Leaving My Mark

Urban streets, tower blocks and graffiti may not be the first things you expect to see in an interiors shop in Dulwich Village. But Jane Newbery’s gallery, in the basement of her shop, is a brilliant place for Torie Wilkinson’s Living London exhibition. Jane is enthusiastic about the paintings she shows in her Dulwich Village shop, which is itself arranged like an exhibition, with unusual gifts, luxury items and lovely things for the home creating a delightful environment for browsing. Some of Torie’s paintings are on show in the shop, where they look right at home, and Jane tells me that sales have been very good. I can see why.

Having seen Torie’s work only as small images on her website, I’m really surprised by how gutsy her paintings are when seen in the flesh. Initially unassuming, the images suddenly grab me: I notice Torie’s painterly technique (mostly oil on canvas, I think), her muted palette and her almost-abstract compositions; then the images come into focus, and the subjects are pretty mundane. But the treatment of these subjects creates intriguing pictures. I find them fascinating. Torie’s views of ordinary-looking buildings and streets, high-rise housing estates, railway arches, graffiti and urban decay are quirky, and often humorous. Her work is about a positive depiction of subjects usually regarded as pretty grim. In subject matter and in technique, Torie’s paintings remind me of work by Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff – two social realist School of London painters of unsentimental London scenes, who encrusted the surfaces of their pictures with thick impasto. Another influence might be John Bratby – the Kitchen Sink painter who took a candid look at the dreariness of domestic life in the 1950s, and was inspired to create images that celebrated the everyday world of ordinary people. Torie certainly seems to be continuing this tradition of celebrating the ordinary, seeing beauty in the banal and poetry in the commonplace.

SLWAEditor: Future exhibitions at Jane Newbery Gallery, 33 Dulwich Village include SLWA’s Laura Moreton Griffiths 2nd – 30th November