Showing between Saturday 28th March and Thursday 2nd April 2009 @ Centrespace Gallery, Bristol

Tom White is older than I expected. What a terrible way to start a review I know, but it’s true. The only reason I had expected someone younger is the subject matter he has chosen for his Moment In Time exhibition; the slightly run down, underground cool and, lets face it, a little rough areas of Bristol. His paintings depict Stokes Croft, Easton and Montpellier, and it was this fact that made me expect an urban graffiti type artist in their early twenties. However, as soon as you look at White’s work, it is apparent that there is something entirely more compassionate and sensitive than the art these areas usually offer. It soon becomes apparent why, as White talks of the charity work he does in the area. He works for Second Step, which supports people with mental health and other support needs in the area.

It is not just the subjects he picks to paint that are interesting, but the manner in which he depicts them and his feeling for the area and its residents translates beautifully onto the canvas. I found myself looking at areas like Turbo-Island and pubs like the Star & Garter, which I pass everyday on the way to work, in a way I had never seen them before. What in real life (to my non artistic eye at least) appears hard, grimy, run down but with a sort of gritty urban cool is soothed under White’s brush into something which portrays the places, as well as the people as vividly alive, and as vulnerably beautiful. It is the transience and vulnerability of these places and the people that White gets across so well in his exhibition.

The style of his paintings is impressionistic, using oil and acrylic, and the colour in many of them is soft, painted in the sunlight which puts to the forefront of the mind the movement of these people and places and consequently detracts from the much less subtle decay. It is the decay, the moment in time which is fleeting and may soon me lost, that White captures so well. His pieces include Waiting, his interpretation of addicts waiting first thing in the morning for their morphine prescriptions, unnoticed or ignored by passers by, and No Rubbish, depicting lines of wheelie bins against a wall covered in graffiti including the infamous Ghost Boy which White informed me was whitewashed by the council the day after his painting was completed. He added with a touch of irony that; “The council can’t see that the picture is probably worth more than the building is.”

It is this sense of wanting to preserve something undervalued, ignored and consequently fleeting that is the heart of this exhibition. White himself is so involved in the preservation that his paintings have something more than simply an observant eye and a talent with paint; he genuinely cares about his subject, and it shows.

As I left he was waiting for one of his subjects, Neil, a recovering addict from Stokes Croft to drop in for a photograph next to his portrait. I asked if it was promotional, he said no, the photo was just to give to Neil; “It helps self confidence I think.” And the same sentiment is present in his art; he gives something that battered and bruised a confidence in its underlying beauty.

www.centrespacegallery.com

www.greatwhiteart.com

Natalie Burns