Tom Palin: A Room with a View (15 January - 13 March 2004)

By Paul O'Keeffe (Liverpool Daily Post, Wednesday, January 21, 2004)

Miniature paintings put life in a new perspective

The largest of Tom Palin’s pictures is about a foot square. The smallest is the size of a postcard. Such a miniature scale invites the viewer to go up close and certainly from this range there is much to see in the surface texture alone—in the way the thick, lumpy oil paint has been applied, ploughed with brush strokes and generally pushed around.

Lit from the side, the uneven picture plain casts tiny shadows, giving it an added dimension and interest, independent of its form and colour. So by all means go in close; but then step back—perhaps seven or eight feet, or even ten feet—and look again. Small as these works are, they are intended to be viewed from a distance. Only then is the eye tricked into smoothing out the roughness, harmonising the colour combinations and discerning the figurative elements that are not always visible at close quarters; a woman’s face seen through a Venetian blind, a woman wearing a yellow dress, another in a black bra.

Palin’s categories of subject matter are roughly the same as those called on by painters for centuries: the figure in an interior, the portrait, the landscape, the still life. But he also has a taste for the bizarre. One picture shows a girl suspended upside down from a ladder for no apparent reason and elsewhere there is a pink scarecrow, seen in profile one long thin arm raised at ninety degrees to the long thin body, pointing.

Three "Panoramas” form a group: wide panels mounted one above another. Two are conventional landscapes, earth and sky demarcated either side of an horizon. The third might be described as “micro-landscape” focussing as it does on a single, horizontal strand of barbed wire.