My favourite painting in Leonard Sexton’s solo exhibition at The Blue Leaf gallery is called ‘Figure Study’. It is loaded with surprises and challenges. This painting doesn’t follow the typical approach where an artist takes a photograph and then sets out to carefully copy it over the next month or so.

Sexton (who is now working in north Co Dublin) explodes that expectation right away.
Firstly, this large work in oil is messy, active and fierce. The canvas is a risk taking tangle of large brushstrokes that gently conjure up a nude woman softly bathed in morning’s first light.

When faced with a painting of a nude, we have come to expect a classical approach that fleshes out the figure using all of the tricks of the academy.

Instead of this safe and pretty voyeurism, Sexton’s painting requires the viewer to ask some questions about paint and emotion. He carves this work with thick competing swathes and strokes.

For me, this painting is a delight to look at because it is action-packed and also so enormously passionate.

But yet, underlying all those busy brushstrokes there is a delicate voice of an early morning awakening.

The subject of the painting, a woman, was deeply asleep just a moment ago.

David Newton
Blue Leaf Gallery