STELLA CHRISTIE'S first solo show since leaving Glasgow School of Art

in 1987 creates a real impact at the Tricyle arts complex in Kilburn.

After trying to earn a living as a textile designer in a market that

wanted only small floral prints, she turned instead to painting and this

show represents 20 of her most recent works. Their effect in a stark

white room is stunning. Small, lyrical paintings demand close inspection

and their effect is akin to collage with the figures and animals that

populate the works cut out and arranged with minute attention to detail.

In general, the works present an intimate world in which animals run

as freely as the solitary, often female, humans. Food plays an important

role in Christie's work and the arcadian picnic is hinted at but without

any suggestion of sensual gratification. In The Meal, a single woman

sits at the head of a table and elegant spotted dogs leap playfully

around, but the fate of the two caged pigs in the background is

suggested by the inscription on the table legs: Rasher, Bacon, Ham.

Other picnic meals offer only bare bones.

Christie explains that two of the themes that interest her are of the

passing of time and of the kind of power play that is evident in the

food chain, which is graphically but never intrusively present in her

best works. These ideas are also present in Mute which derives its title

from the empty bubble escaping cartoon-like from a woman's mouth. It

seems that language (or its absence) and its relation to painting is one

of the underlying preoccupations in these works.

Whimsical phrases are often inscribed on works and the titles enrich

their meaning in an almost surrealist, evocative way. Bucket of Warm

Milk for example, depicts a woody glade with the eponymous bucket at its

heart. It is a strangely disquieting yet hauntingly beautiful work.

Taken together, the 20 works with their rich dark colours, lush

landscapes and small figures exude stillness and a sense of

anticipation.

It is a welcome and unanticipated pleasure to find such finely

crafted, thoughtful and thought-provoking works amongst so much

overblown and commercial art in today's cynical market.

* A Light Dip -- Recent Paintings by Stella Christie, is at Tricycle

Gallery, 269 Kilburn High Road, London, to August 14