Following on from last week's weather I've been scouring the internet to see how painters have dealt with mist and I found this enigmatic affair. Simply titled "Landscape", the painting is on a panel just 13cm by 16cm. There's a real ambiguity about it, with it being impossible to say if the bands of colour are hills or walls or cloud banks. The painting is a simple progression of closely related colours over a far wider tonal range than you first realise and is less monochromatic than it first appears too. It takes supreme confidence in your own ability and judgement to release a painting this simple and with so little definition. When you see the second tranche of nocturnes I'm finishing off at the moment, you'll understand why I have a reaction to this painting.
Simcock only died last year and this is far from typical of his output. He is best known for brooding pictures of bleak cottages on bleak hillsides around Staffordshire and the village of Mow Cop, where he lived. This later piece is perhaps typical, with the cottages shown from below so they appear very exposed and with the colours pretending to be monochrome when in truth they are anything but.
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