“Ansel Quire Painted a Handrail and Forgot to Make It Frightening”

Salt Ledger Hall, Kelp Row, ten forty on a grey Saturday morning. I am standing in front of a handrail. It is two metres twenty tall. It has been hung where a halibut auction used to happen, and I would rather be at the auction.

The painting is called Handrail, Third Step Down. Oil on raw linen, 220 by 160 centimetres, the edges left unprimed so that a dirty tidemark runs round the border like a bath nobody cleaned. The rail is in the Dust Quarter, beside the skate park steps. Ansel Quire knows it well. I will not discuss the wrist. I came to review a canvas, and a canvas is all that was brought.

Here is the trouble. A handrail that has hurt someone should look like it knows. This one looks like it is waiting for a bus. The concrete steps are a flat pigeon grey, laid on with a palette knife and the confidence of a man icing a cake he does not like. The sky is a thin bruise-yellow that goes nowhere. Nothing in this picture has any intention of harming anybody.

There are good accidents. Lower left, Quire has pressed real grit from the park into the wet paint, and it sits there like crumbs on a tablecloth. It is the only place where the surface behaves like a floor. One drip of paint runs sideways across the rail, because he worked the canvas flat on the ground. I have seen galleries spend forty thousand on that sort of mistake. Here it is free, and it is the best thing in the room, and he probably does not know.

Then the orange. I resent writing this. The rail is the orange of municipal rust paint, the colour councils buy by the drum for fences and bollards. Quire has not brightened it or made it glamorous. He has let it be tired, a little chalky, with a pink cast where the sun has chewed it. It is exactly right. Against all that grey it hums like a fridge in an empty flat. Everything else in the picture is a rumour. The orange is a witness.

Which makes the rest worse. Why spend one flawless colour and then leave it standing alone in a field of polite grey? It is like hiring a tenor and giving him one line in a play about weather.

His whole method is to paint only what he has fallen on. Fine. It is a rule, and rules are what painters hide behind when they have run out of weather. But a fall is not a subject. A fall is a rumour of a subject. Next time, Mr Quire, paint the half second before, when the board leaves the ground and you know. That half second would be a painting. This is its receipt.

Handrail, Third Step Down is on until the twenty-second of November. Go for the orange. Stand six metres back, then leave before the grey starts talking to you.