The yumminess of paint
‘Painting has always been dead,’ Willem de Kooning once mused. ‘But I was never worried about it.’ The exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery is crammed with work by 31 artists who likewise don’t allow the allegedly moribund state of their medium to keep them away from pigments and palette. This is well worth a visit, not only to see such good things as ‘Hold the Right Rail’ by the 87-year-old Rose Wylie, containing a patch of yellow curtain that somehow holds the eye and stays in the memory; the kind of magic that paint can work like nothing else. Elsewhere there is plenty of evidence
