This section contains a selection of articles and exhibition reviews. Selected writings to be added.

Tom Hackney : Suspended Belief 

"When considering the artist Tom Hackney, it is easy to envisage a young man with a fierce squint and gnarled fingers clasped around a threadbare paintbrush, a little like Dustin Hoffman's half-blind forger in Papillon. Non of this is meant to be insulting just that, after spending some time studying his astounding photo-realist oil paintings, you have to wonder.

From any sort of distance, they appear to be photographs, and only nose-to-the-frame proximity confirms the meticulous brushwork. Based on the artist's own photographs of obscure film locations taken in the brilliant light of Los Angeles, Hackney has captured not only the rigid bricks and mortar of anonymous buildings, but the more ephemeral affects of nature; the sunlight that whitens the margins of clouds and sprinkles over the sea in American Legion Memorial Bridge, Amity Island, or the shifting blur of darker sand where the tide is dissolving in God Damn You All To Hell (which lacks a half submerged Statue Of Liberty to identify it as being the beach from Planet of the Apes).

It all makes the famously fastidious detail of the Pre-Raphaelites look like a Francis Bacon, and there's something simultaneously wonderful and yet a little scary about it. Perhaps Hackney's work can be seen as a critique of art technology, or in terms of a postmodern analysis of levels of perception but, ultimately, any philosophical considerations merely dull the experience - this is best viewed simply as an amazing display of painting."