Phillip Allen

This is an essay by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith. Phillip Allen is an original and distinguished voice in British painting. He is known for his distinctive paintings, predominantly oil on board, in which the bottom and top edges are encrusted with a thick, globular application of paint. Such is the impastoed thickness, that the very paint itself seems to cling to the support, evoking a certain tension and an evident vulnerability. His preoccupation with the visual margins - physically and conceptually transgressing the rectangular boundaries of the painting - seems to subvert the traditional hierarchy of how we read the picture plain - a distraction maybe, so as not to deal with the act of painting itself.