Pharmacist Painting

Technically, John's paintings are easy to categorise: his working methods would be recognisable to any painter from the last 500 years. The uncertainty which his paintings introduces comes when we describe their content. His obsession with trying to establish an image leads to an almost hallucinatory state of realism. Objects and animals appear, but almost too clearly; the vividness of the light, the fluidity of the brushwork or the saturation of the colour lead to an equivocation about what it is we're actually looking at. A chair is pushed under a table, but the small details - like how the light falls on the chair back, or the angle of the veneered table - distract and unsettle. The physical practice of painting - Hiom's technical facility with paint - is used with cold logic to create images of ambiguity, disquiet and a strangely obscure version of reality. His work has recently taken on a multimedia practice that encompasses painting, photography, film, and sounds.