With around 50 recent paintings of all dimensions in this exhibition, the viewer will be able to see that Fairclough's subject matter is equally as effective at six inches square as at 48 inches square - rarely the case, in my opinion. Here is a serious painter - don't miss him.

Ian Courcoux

"The painted horizon is dropping lower and lower, at times becoming indistinct or veiled. The painted sky is growing more dominant, filling with many structured layers of cloud. Vaporous stratus obscures islands and hills, stratocumulus crowds the horizon and hides the lowering sun. Cumulonimbus towers up to reach the levels at which cirrus forms, mares' tails in the sky as ephemeral as the ice crystals of which they are made".

"Ice crystals refract the light of the sun creating sun dogs and sun haloes, the geometry of physics producing phenomena which gave rise to myths. Contrails, like Icarus, approach the sun at peril. the paint is multi-layered, scraped and re-applied. The palette-knife gives a physical force and life to the surface of a paint mixed with powdered, fired clay, the substance of the paint itself but more gritty and coarse. The crusty, structured surface is at once both a denial of the nature of the sky, rock not air, earth not vapour, and an expression of it, it's structured layers, forms and movement".

"Finally it is the sun itself that dominates, the focal point within the surrounding rhythms, reflections and structures, weightless white light made visible by the heaviest pigment on the artist's palette".

Michael Fairclough