The bright new colours Alex adopted in Greece and Sicily, have now come home to a bold new series of Portland paintings, where the abstract correlates with reality in what he calls ‘subjectivised colour’. Compositions of crisp rooflines and angled architecture set our present ‘now’ against the timeless wonders of sea, sky and mountain. He is a painter whose sense of colour and ability to combine unusual angles consistently surprises and refreshes the eye. Often linked to the work of Edward Hopper, Alex Lowery’s wide and deep knowledge of art history feed into his own highly original sensibility.

In his confident, thrilling paintings of West Bay and Portland and the stretch of Dorset coastline in between, he has long been a master at transforming the very real and everyday into something universal and heart-stopping. Constantly experimenting and pushing his work in new ways, Alex plays with the eyes, taking you around his subject matter while making you aware of the ‘heft’ of the paint itself. Areas of rough foliage contrast with intense areas of colour and texture, the paint varying from translucent to opaque, as the raking light shifts the shadows and lights up unexpected angles.