This is a rather long and serious introduction to an artist who many people associate first and foremost with the tongue-in-cheek ‘Sniffy’ paintings - masterfully colourful paintings featuring the ‘sniffy’ rotund butler within gallery and stately home settings, always surrounded by old masters and an air of the ridiculous. Not only finely executed, these paintings offer humorous and sometimes surreal vignettes of the good life - wine flows and there is always cake, as we are treated to a painting within a painting, a Canaletto or a John Singer Sargent from the end of Joe’s brush. There is always a little more than meets the eye however, and these ‘Sniffy’ paintings are a commentary of sorts, with Joe’s playful juxtapositions of the traditional and the modern raising questions about the value of contemporary art, and his humorous ‘vignettes’ providing us with a visual picture of some of the debates that take place in the strange and wonderful place that is the art world today. Even with all of its challenges and contradictions - and perhaps because of them - it is Joe’s world, the place he has inhabited creatively for decades and the source of his inspiration. The ‘Sniffy’ paintings can be enjoyed on their own, but it is in the context of a solo show like this that we can really appreciate them as part of the larger narrative of Joe’s life and work. The solo exhibition is also an opportunity to show the breadth of Joe’s creative output, and in particular, some of his larger figurative paintings, which reveal his life-long study of Western art and culture and his ability to see and make connections between its past, present and future. In his early 70s now, Joe’s unshakeable energy and commitment to the arts is admirable and the future will undoubtedly remember his contributions as an individual artist and for the work he has done to promote visual art in the West of Scotland and Scotland more generally. For now though, we are able to delight in his paintings, and to treat ourselves to a full exhibition of work by one of Scotland’s most accomplished painters. From the largest gestural abstracts to the smallest of his character studies, Joe’s brushwork is irresistible and feels like painting at its most fluent.
Eileadh Swan Gallery Director
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