Gordon Dalton, ‘Smokey Joe from Mexico'

Gordon Dalton’s painting focus on a small stretch of coastline that includes places of personal importance on the North East coast. His work contains a slow choreographic mapping of an everchanging landscape that is shackled by its past and unsure of its future, neither here nor there. Familiar motifs and half remembered memories are buried amongst doubt, cliché, a cloud of nostalgia and the ancient and modern ruins that dot the skyline. The paintings have a disinterested curiosity that is both critical and celebratory of these places. They are viewed equally with disdain and affection, reverberating ad-infinitum between a familiar and a strange apprehension of this haunted land. The paintings act as ‘parafictions’ about place attachment. They are portals to another time in the past, present or future where a slow violence is inflicted upon these landscapes. Dalton’s paintings want everything to be alright but are acutely aware that this is not the case. They contain the essence of these landscapes and the melancholy of longing and wanting to belong. An unfashionable romanticism grounded in the act of painting.

Gordon Dalton is an artist based in Saltburn-by-the-Sea. He is currently a Doctoral Researcher at Loughborough University and a member of Contemporary British Painting.