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And in the bird there wakes an eye,
Within the eye, earth, sea and sky,
Earth, sky and sea within an O

Kathleen Raine

Keith Purser's paintings and constructions explore the hinterland, the place where land, sea & sky meet, blended together or snuffed out by light. Each picture deals with the mysterious transformation that play between matter and the elements. The layers of colour in The Key with their torn off billboard look, their memories of past seasons visible beneath the present, show the power of light to bleach and subdue. Even the bird is part of continuing change. Occlusion gives us a titled horizon, a passage wheeling round from land to sea, the place where matter, air & rain intercept, the whole infused with light, made resonant by sunshine. In Wind and Sea space turns pewter; the possibility is that spay will metamorphose into bird just as the dark stand is intercut by a gull, the endurable horizon obliterated by a wave. In The Rains perspective is tossed and reassembled in the round; whitecap is horizon; sand gravels landscape, becoming at the edges spume; vermilion earths a bar of black: a shaft of white appears as solid.

Keith Purser reveals in this recent work a new assurance. Following in the lineage of classic post-war coastal painters, echoes of Ben Nicholson show up here in the successful marriage of opposites, the atmospheric and firmly structured qualities which they both share. But Purser's approach is not intellectual. Turneresque in colour and lost form, his influences lean more towards de Steal and Christopher Wood.

Naomi Brandel 2001