excessive attention and respect. Thus with our innate visionary senses refreshed and our inner eye restored we are invited to shed our usual self-conscious relationship with the material and factual world and again become totally engrossed and lost in the magical world of our personal imagination and collective memories. The last word however should go to Henry Kondracki himself who made this artist’s statement for my book Contemporary Painting in Scotland back in 1992. I attempt to portray the beauty, ugliness and extraordinariness of everyday living. I build images that are a synthesis of thought, memory, emotion, fact and fiction. As the wonderful paintings in this new exhibition clearly reveal the artist has not deviated from this self-imposed mission. Furthermore, his ever increasing technical skill and artistic inventiveness, gained over the last two decades, has brought its achievement all that much closer. Bill Hare
3 Appleton Tower oil on canvas 61 x 30.5 cms