CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Ordinary excitements
What made Roy Oxlade excel as a painter, says MICHAL BONCZA, was his ability to transform the everyday into objects of wonder
(L to R) Woman on a Table, 2002; Untitled (All images: courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London © Estate of Roy Oxlade)
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
ROY OXLADE, who died in 2014 at the age of 85, was many things — all of them inextricably interlinked and interdependent.
A celebrated teacher, a radical and compelling philosopher in the field of art and a painter with a captivating and intriguing vision, he was also a lifelong Labour voter with a disdain for the Establishment and the monarchy, in particular the latter’s dispensation of “honours” to those in the arts.
As a new online exhibition of his work Art & Instinct at London's Alison Jacques Gallery demonstrates, he was an enfant terrible by nature and a true renaissance man by choice, with both complementing each other to perfection.
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