Simon English's highly engaging stream-of-consciousness "painted drawings" mix text and words to explore themes of love, loss, pop music, literature and gay culture. These most recent works are larger in scale and intersperse spontaneous, sploshily rendered, cartoon-like creatures, people and buildings with diaristic musings, song lyrics, poetry and humorous one-liners. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey through a free-associating imagination, with English's serendipitous love of chance associations and repurposings reflected in the exhibition's title, which comes from an old record he found and carries open-ended connotations of both painting the town red and falling off the wagon-no doubt what many of us will be up to as lockdown eases.
Louisa Buck
