John Hurrell – 3 July, 2026

With this show of seven subtly eerie oil paintings and six watercolours, it is hoped that we experience a creepy intensity that effortlessly dominates any normally sanguine viewer’s viscerality. You might unexpectantly feel your compulsively gazing body shake involuntarily with alarm; the use of cool analysis, steady reason, evenhandedness and corporeal control being strangely recklessly abandoned. Instead you experience a trembling, uncontrollable gut rejection suddenly surfacing from the presentation, notably via its perversely delicate but disturbing watercolours.

They are the highlights. However scathing moral messages seem to be embedded in all these paintings, alluding to the transience of love and assorted fickle commitments of the human heart. These are not overtly preachy: instead of heavyhandedness they seem to be matter-of-fact statements of warning using symbolic plants or sheets within portraits.

Stichbury’s symmetrical oil-painted images have an icy coolness that keep their distance, for viewer emotion is carefully controlled; rattling extremes avoided. Impeccable complexions banish distracting wispy loops of hair or annoying spots. They are weirdly abnormal for the faces are not generic, though initially they might seem so.

For example the eyes avoid challenging the onlooker’s gaze as something intrusive. The subject’s gaze is dead. Not quite lid-drooping or deeply bored, though uber-passive.

Here we have a hint of the zombie, for it can be argued that there is a built-in furtive sense of horror. Alarming though indirect. Scary, indifferent—though strangely tangential.

John Hurrell

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