Elemental beauty, artistic confidence and narrative contradictions lie at the heart of Geoffrey Notman’s work. These important paintings about location, identity and desire use the architecture and language of objects in relation to its immediate surroundings to imbue each work with accumulating matters-of-fact.

Notman uses enamacryl for its characteristic brightness and because it has the flow properties of oil paint. His brushstroke varies significantly across each work but the even-handed treatment, precision and accuracy resulting is deceptive. The paintings are filled with complex details that reveal specific information and so narrative consequences and debates involving the politics of culture and the social anthropology of behaviour emerge.

Questions about the passage of time and time standing still, of abandoned and claimed, ugly and beautiful, urban/rural, land/sea, use and neglect, failure and endeavour, work versus leisure etc stand in amongst signs and symbols of independence and self-dependence.

But there is no romantic thesis of nostalgia at work here: Notman takes us to where we live and to what we value, and also to that we forget overlook and park-up. He goes into the external environment of home and locale seeing the signs of who we are and presents it as is. In this way the ultimate undeniable and considerable success of these works is found in the participatory linkage the viewer makes through this to the internal world of dream, memory, circumstance, fact, and hope.

The paintings in “Gin Trap” are location specific portraits of (cultural) identity and resonate with the particular music of reality and use. In “Blood Bin” a red plastic bin is presented as a metaphor and meditation on death; “Elsewhere” combines the paradox of a boat’s name with sheets blowing in the wind; the Sunday afternoon project of “Gin Trap” is forever delayed by discourse, and “Gravel Road Blues” (amongst many things) is a visual pun of repetitions and intersecting angles.