e-mail: m_mcintyre77 at yahoo dot com

In America and, indeed through most of the western world, people have a very sentimental attachment to brands of beer. This is in a way that's impossible to imagine with, say, mayonnaise. Just think of the insult felt by many Washington Rainer beer drinkers when the profile of Mount Rainer changed from a North Western view to a Californian one. It's enough to make you stop drinking the stuff there and then. Mary McIntyre's paintings look at the ties that form these attachments; building on the pop art conception of the still life in the process, with the wine bottles and fruit commonly synonymous with still life left out in favour of the stuff we commonly see as rubbish.

For me, McIntyre's paintings bring back a lot of memories. When I see 'Beer Cans' it takes me back to the aftermath of a party in a house I lived in. We'd bought a lot of beer, thinking that no-one would bring any; but everybody did. In the end there was so much beer and spirits in our kitchen that we threw a smaller, impromptu party again the next day to get rid of it all. It was fantastic. Then the day after that we had to clean up the mess. When we gathered all the cans together we filled four bin bags with crushed cans. it was quite sick, looking at it all like that; the remnants of so much cheap beer all in one place. Yet each can carried a small part of the party. It would have been very different without them. In this sense, 'Beer Cans' represents landfills, dustbins and memories all over America.

A similar narrative takes place in 'Glasses'. As with 'Beer Cans', small elements combine to tell a much larger story. The lucid precision of the painting style draws out the beauty of the scene, operating in contrast to the essential feeling of alienation felt through the rest of the composition. A half full book of matches sits on the weathered bar next to the row of empty and half full glasses. Time stretches out, yet there is a sense of Arcadia at work here. The early evening light aptly captures that end of the day feeling, when it's so easy to convince yourself a drink on the way home is exactly the thing to make everything in your world seem right.

When McIntyre widens the lens we see some of the people doing the drinking. In 'Drey at the Comet', a young woman sits by herself, staring blankly at a point outside of the painting, evading the viewer's gaze. Whereas 'Glasses' has a first person point of view, 'Drey at the Comet' uses a distinctly third person perspective, in which Drey's emotional world is inaccessible. In 'Blue Moon' we see a young woman talking on the phone behind the counter in an empty bar. There is an almost cinematic invitation to imagine the conversation she's having, combined with a Hopperesque feeling of intrusive voyeurism. The result is both intimate and uncomfortable. McIntyre takes this a step further with her nudes, posing a logical modern day progression from Manet's 'Olympia', with that painting's unapologetic challenge to accepted middle class notions of femininity finding a new home in 'Reagan' with the model's brusque way of putting on her vest.

Daniel Fone
London, England
December 2004