THOMAS NEWBOLT

The Massacre of the Innocents is a subject that Thomas Newbolt had wanted to tackle ever since, as a student, he collected newspaper photos of blood-stained shoppers in Oxford Street after an IRA bomb.

In Egypt at the time of 9/11, he rose every morning to draw people moving along the Nile in the half-light before the sudden dawn. Drawing, as usual from life - but not in a life-room - but in this case straining to see with the help of binoculars, he realised that massacres of innocents, such as in Rwanda and elsewhere, could have taken place under the cover of darkness.

He completed a series of large paintings in that kind of light-denied atmosphere, and in the months after the Janin massacre on 14 April 2002, the series of poignant and devastating drawings.

In the drawings the atmosphere is played up and the lines down - tonally very close. With no strong shadows they are all about the half light in which it is a struggle to see.

In Newbolt’s most recent work, a series of etchings of the Passion, the same darkness pervades with the figure of Christ whited out as an indication of his separateness. Although he has no particular take on this familiar theme, as a visual person his aim is simply to make the images convincing, which they are, affecting the viewer on a deeply emotional level.