Melvin Day

If this exhibition gives the lie to that campaign then the recent work of Melvin Day must egg me on, for it was a singularly distasteful display of ultra-abstract ostentation.

Don't get me wrong.

Day is a serious painter and has integrity; but the truth is he just hasn't the requisite ability to say his say by means of pure abstraction.

To make it worse, his picture titles bear no correlation whatever to his subject, and his preoccupation with texture far outweighs the time given to communication. In fact, there's none.

This anti-academic work must bear for many viewers the leprous taint of its author's self-inflicted stigma of incoherence and incommunicability. To speak, as did Russell Bond, of Day's "mounting stature" is to talk nonsense.