Brent Millar: Empathy, Energy, Joy and Body Hair

Brent Millar has always carried his great talent with a light touch. It is a true painter's touch - direct, searching, sensual - which finds form in a fabulously rich body of work, bound together by the truth of an almost child-like vision. In Brent's work, appearances are deceptive. These pictures are playful, but like the swans that glide in and out of his paintings, the artist is hard at work just below the surface. Each picture comes straight from the mouth of babes, but Brent's work also summons a world of poetry, half-hidden below the surface, which is the stuff and substance of life. Whether Empathy, Energy, Joy or Body Hair, Brent paints the stuff we're made of. In art as in life, it's all there - you just need to look closely.

Douglas Erskine