The Window Paintings by John Bevis

Stephen Skidmore & A Poem by John Bevis

Carpe Diem IV
Published by Coracle & Galerie Hubert Winter
32pp, 206 x 133; casebound. 2015, 25.00 euros
With 7 plates.
Available to buy here: www.coracle.ie

The Window Paintings follow on from Stephen Skidmore’s exquisite series of Rain Paintings, which looked down from the window of his bedsit – or ‘studio apartment’ – to the uneventful street below, its pavements and parked cars and blurry hints of apartment walls. Sometimes the focus strayed no further than the drops of rain fused to the window glass itself. Now, a new series of paintings looks up from the same viewpoint to treetops, rooflines and clouds, in almost colour-free compositions that re-examine the scarce variations of a view both mundane and ominous of the suburban dormitory.

The poem written to accompany the paintings is in six sections. It has a jagged, almost improvised quality which marks a departure from the author’s previous essays. Fragments of past lives of occupants of the room are imagined in a series of interactions between the view from the window, whether studied or glimpsed, and what is going on inside, in a montage described by Simon Cutts as ‘a cold-war narrative’.

‘… one integrity, two symmetry, three chaos
his latest effort toward constructing the simplest model
fit to accommodate the window’s view…’