“Were we influenced by size? By the unusual nature of the subject? Or by technical excellence? The painting that eventually won the second prize of £7,000, Danny Markey’s Camper Van and Car, Falmouth Bay, answers one of those questions, at least. It’s very small, obviously a spontaneous sketch made on the spot, on the page of a sketchbook, without any preparatory drawing whatever. At first sight, it even looks too casual to be true. But it’s also the purest watercolour of any we saw: gloriously confident, loose, brimming with light and somehow entirely positive.”

Frank Whitford, Art Critic for The Sunday Times and one of the judges, writing in The Sunday Times, 30 August 2009.

It is famously not the purpose of modern art to console. The most suspect of effects, consolation carries with it a fear of sentimentality and gutlessness: either the artist is coating the pill or we’re looking for easy reassurances. Danny Markey’s painterly touch is light without being at all soft; his drawings, watercolours and oils are plain-spoken to the point of introversion; they cast no significant glances at us, the world or each other. The fact remains that they are very consoling indeed, and one wonders why.

The subject-matter is simple, like a straight blues riff: suburban landscapes and night scenes, which at first sight appear lonely until one registers, almost everywhere, the residual presence of humanity. Cars nestle in driveways; a solitary camper van looks out over the bay, a river of lights drifts down a Welsh valley. Even when the humanizing strokes are few, so that we’re more aware of absence than presence, the effect can be soothing, though not perhaps comforting, cars and vans and cement-mixers making a kind of wide-screen still-life with the natural world for a backdrop.

Markey is a tonal adept, too. And this is where writers get in a tangle, trying to list the colours of the rainbow – the mauve-grey of thunderheads, that dab of turquoise amid the pebbledash. Whereas it’s probably the case that the subtle colourists – like Bonnard, like Diebenkorn, and Markey – aren’t that bothered by the question of range and don’t think of colour as an aesthetic device. It’s more akin to a reflex technique: the right shade of purple solves a problem of form, and accurately conveys the vanishing point at which solid high ground becomes night sky. Sometimes the technique brings with it a fresh, unsettling insight. If you look into the blue of the New Mexico horizon, there’s a hint of black in the top slice of the visual field, presumably because that is what the blazing azure becomes in the top slice of the earth’s atmosphere. You can see, or sense, at the periphery of Markey’s swiftly drawn “Desert Places” series, and even in the brightest of his blues, a metallic reminder of that same darkness.

It’s a way of looking at things that owes a lot to instinctive draughtsmanship. Part of the energy of these works comes from their directness. They deftly notate forms and colours, places and landscapes and then export that deftness into other media, from conté crayon to oil, say, with no loss of immediacy. It argues a quickness of perception that is not unrelated, I think, to the underlying mystery of Markey’s emotionalism, and of why I love the two drawings that I own so much and go to them every day.

When I look at them, I feel I am being told the truth and treated as a grown-up; and very little art actually does this. More often, what one is schooled to admire is the illusion of honesty, the aptness of the scene or the forced economy of line or the brave boldness of the “idea”, all of which seem to me to be troubled, necessarily, by what they’ve left out – inconvenient parking, those bloody cement-mixers, feeling, skill.

Markey’s inclusiveness isn’t exhaustive. He isn’t a merciless realist; there is still selection at work, or he wouldn’t be an artist. The point is that he accepts what he sees, and doesn’t wish it away. The view of Falmouth bay from the inside of a car, with a rear-view mirror and air-freshener exploding in the sky, is less a calculated effect (though that effect is funny and pleasing) than an acknowledgment of the fact that it’s raining, and there is nowhere else to go. He hasn’t sought either to get around this or to ennoble the bleak outlook with aggressive artistic purpose. This is what we have to look at today, his paintings tell us, and the view is always provisional. It amounts to a letting-go of preconceptions, and in letting them go we’re freed to discover something else.

Will Eaves, August 2009

Will Eaves is a writer and Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. His first novel 'The Oversight' (2001) was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. He has also written 'Nothing To Be Afraid Of' (2006)