Derek Ogbourne
Grand Union Community Hub

AS critics rave about Planet Earth 3 on the telly, I want to draw attention to Derek Ogbourne’s otherwordly, organically inspired paintings.

Yes, organic is good for you, working on your insides and outsides simultaneously.

Part sea and sky, part petrie dish, we feel the arc of the painter’s arm with the loaded brush, and the concentrated spontaneity of small colour forms.  

Ogbourne emerged from the YBA movement of the 1990s and his passionate commitment to the stuff of paint and the discipline of colour is palpable. 

Exhibited in Wembley’s new Community Hub by the Grand Union Canal, this is as far away from art establishment “hubs” (hubris?) as you can imagine.

Good to see good fine art off the beaten track, which it often is of course. The new build complex felt like a Soviet block showing an exciting new painter in the 1960s.

I loved the serene lines and airiness of it all, the seats and steps down to the canal, handy for the sunsets.  

The exhibition BLUE/GREY suits this setting and it feels like you are walking around an installation with the building an integral part of it. 

All are recently done but the style and obsession originated in a sale while Ogbourne was at the Slade School of Art in the ’80s, when a canvas Diving For Pearls was shipped off to New York.

The development of this theme has engaged the painter’s mind ever since — with time out for installations and film work that have international standing. 

Ogbourne likes the epic. About half of the paintings evolved from his Lockdown Series where paint is sensually oozed onto flat grey primed canvases, sometimes like live entrails on a butchers slab.

Busy, neurotic organic shapes twist and turn or gyre and gimble (as Jabberwocky has it).  

These are exhibited along a corridor, and it’s as if the brilliant (lurid?) colour of the paint marks are lighting the place up should the overhead lights fail.

These worked best as a whole rather than individual pieces, unlike the “scapes” of blues with more space around them.  

The most successful are where ambiguous images churn against Turner-esque sea-scapes. Some of these shapes on painted water mirror underwater creatures and I was reminded of something Thomas Mann presented in his great novel Dr Faustus.

Specifically the fate of deep-sea fish: having evolved at great depths, they are accidentally caught by anglers and brought to the surface, where they explode. 

As the Communard and painter Gustav Courbet said: “All art owes more to other art, than it ever did to nature,” and there are nods to Miro and Turner in the visual language. If this were music the nods would be to Arnold Schoenberg or Malian Griot.  

With the brush in other hands they might be kitsch, the sort of thing you see in arty shop windows, but with Obgourne they are not arty at all but sublime and sensual with delicious paintwork. They’re wildly physical and it’s important to understand the difference between wizardry and magic — and these have magic.  

So treat yourself, get down to Wembley Quay, a 10-minute walk along the Grand Union Canal from Stonebridge or Alperton Tube stations. Sit there and meditate with your eyes open.

At Grand Union Community Hub, 1 Quay Walk, Wembley HAO 1DY; runs until November 13, admission free. For more information see: grandunioncommunityhub.org.uk.