This untitled painting is among the earliest of the artist's recent series of driving landscapes. Loosely based on collaged montages of multiple photographic images, they examine the way in which we experience the contemporary landscape. The painting's canvas surface becomes a car's windscreen, the view through which is distorted and warped by rain in the form of motttled, stained, sprayed, and scraped oil paint. This particular painting, which portrays a suburban car park, is the only one of the works to incorporate even a peripheral depiction of human figures. As such it serves to underline their irrelevance to McGrath's practice, in which the viewer himself becomes the figure, occupying the vantage point of a car.



A car port ? a particular sort of multi-level, trellised garage found in the southern United States ? quivers like a mirage in the evening sky. Illuminated by a dramatic, celestial cloudbreak like a ship on the sea, the manmade structure anchors the composition and offsets the symmetry of the picture. The legibility of the its features, both natural and man-made, are disrupted through a series of carefully crafted optical ambiguities and collapsed perspectives. The artist seems to be posing a question: can today's landscape, an increasingly threatened space consumed by urban sprawl, still provide a romantic, transcendental experience?

Painting from the democratic, almost childlike vantage point of a car passenger seat, the artist uses cool, neutral tones of beige, grey and brown to create an atmosphere of detached melancholy. Tom McGrath's driving landscapes are an investigation not so much of the landscape itself, but rather of our movement through it - and the effect that that movement can have on our environment, both perceptually and culturally. The road, a motif central to a great deal of American music, literature and art, is here employed as a psychological map of the passengers inside, as a metaphor of their running to or from something, or indeed of their not knowing where to go.