Review of Awakening
by Mr. Tom Mooney ( Editor Echo Newaspapers)


Looking at Paul McCloskey’s oeuvre to date, his portraits and his land scapes, his inventory of absolute imagination and truth in colour, it is fruitful to recall the late poet Ted Hughes’ belief that until the artist experiences revelation, there can be no release.

Disclosure or catharsis can happen in many shapes or forms, but for the visual artist the release is generally slow and purposeful: what evolves is intended, as opposed to the free improvisation we associate with jazz, for example.

Persuing Paul’s latest exhibition, Awakenings, I feel a witness to another’s purgation: the catalyst that provokes the artist is the interplay between mood and imagination. And yet Paul is an artist who dispenses with overt analysis, is sceptical of injudicious scrutiny, is impatient with fads and theory, is a purist in his meticulous harrowing of colour: he requests the viewer to trust their senses, to absorb the experience of fathoming colour with the excitement of a new dawn after a dark deluge.
With Paul’s landscapes, nature is a thing to be felt, the incalculable music of the eyes. He has managed to mingle earth and heaven into a tangible being. Emerging from the vortex is the evanescence of the tinted steam we had thought the preserve of Turner: Paul McCloskey reminds us that the ordinary can be the most precious in life.