Mali Morris, RA London January 1014

 "I have always admired and been fascinated by the intricate, slow way that Marilyn builds her paintings. Looking in on her various studios over the years I marvel at the layers of drawing, tracing and photocopying, the collaging and reconstruction that goes on. This exploratory work accumulates and is sifted through, well before she begins to paint on canvas. That is what intrigues me - how her search leads to resolution, her preparation to realisation. The completed paintings are airy, with light flowing through them, and for all their complexity they are vividly direct, immediately radiant.

The relationship of drawing to painting is of great interest to visual artists, be they figurative, abstract, or indifferent to those categories. In Verbena in the Sky Marilyn describes with line and colour the way a delicate tangle of flowers grows high on a balcony, in front of ornate iron railings. A long way below, in the park. dogs and their owners re visible, tiny but identifiable. Flat rectangles of various blues, greens and an intense red were laid down as the first stage of this composition. There would have been studies of the layers of space glimpsed through foliage, strategies for how different kinds of drawing in paint could mesh with the patchwork of ground-colour, to become one with it. After our first encounter with the glow and filigree of the finished work there is an invitation to slow down and take in its richness. Seeing how it all hangs together is completely absorbing -it contains movement in its stillness, is organised as well as abundant, and it holds the attention for as long as one can look.

Motifs recur in Marilyn's work, echoing fascinations that painters have always had - a window that takes the gaze outside, or the mirror that brings space and light. and perhaps a figure, back into a room. In Collector we are given the colour-key of the painting at centreleft, a still life on a couple of tables. A pink box-file has a lime-green gauze ribbon clipped to its top edge. Propped against it is a postcard, a drawing of Ariel the flower fairy, spreading her wings. A skill and talent for depiction can put us inside an illusionistic interior and describe its details with accuracy, but reading this painting, how it was made - the various greens arrived at through many glazes, the different whites stepping steadily backwards to the final light of the reflected window - all this gives us so much more. The layers and shifts of colour move us around in time and pictorial space, as if forever.

There is a double intimacy in these paintings that I find strange and distinctive. The domestic interior; with its array of objects loved and used and looked-at, sets a personal, almost autobiographical tone. But what we also have is a construction in paint on a flat surface, which has involved the artist in a process of intense scrutiny and analysis, thorough, but intent on keeping the painting fresh, alive and luminous. The activity of looking has been questioned, the process of seeing fragmented and re-made, in order to understand more of what painting tells us about painting, at the same time as it tells of the world. What we are shown is a small part of the world, a table top, or a balcony, but the painting of it reaches far into thought and experience. The commitment to breaking down pictorial language and putting it back together again is clearly evident, but not fetishised. It is an exploration, and it has been shared with us. There is detachment in the method, but passion shows in the conclusion.

Each time I see these paintings and rediscover their achievement I find in them again their intelligence and their beauty, and I feel grateful for what they offer. It's good to think that they will be looked at and enjoyed by so many others during the coming year. "

 Cuillin Bantock 2008

“Going into the studio, I could wish that, after all these years, I had a system or failsafe mechanism that would allow me to execute daily portions of work in a finite and cumulative manner. However … I am always glad that I do not have this safety-net, though I am slow and timid without it.” (Marilyn Hallam 1998)

“At a time when the visual arts can seem dominated by populism and the cult of personality, it is startling to find an artist talking about her work with such naked honesty. This determined rejection of a reliance on habituation or a repertoire of manners, is likewise true of the work itself. One consequence is that each painting comes as a surprise, each with its own resolution of convincing pictorial identity. Another is that, despite Hallam’s doubts, the continuity which unifies this oeuvre has the strength of a steel cable, marked by a series of works of impressive conviction.

Hallam’s choice of subject matter is conservative, even pointedly commonplace: views through a window, interiors, still life, people by the sea. However, there is nothing conservative or commonplace about the treatment. In 1994 I wrote of this work: ” … treated here without a trace of that secondhand softness that sometimes tries to pass for the Bonnardesque … (the paintings are) tough and put together with a cool lightness of hand which conceals the lucid pictorial intelligence which has gone into their making.” What I had not taken wholly on board at that time is the highly evolved artifice involved in these complex works. Despite being figurative, or ‘depictive’ as Hallam prefers, these are not naturalistic paintings. Every component is subject to the demands made by considerations of scale, surface flatness, edge and design, the literal facture and objective truths of what a painting actually is.

Oil paint is marvellous. Luscious even before you start, it is tempting for a painter at once to give way to the siren seductiveness of the stuff itself. Hallam eschews this obvious route. The paint is used quite sparingly, the palette is high-key, the chroma exploratory, and the gaze considered. The actual touch of the paint on the surface is both exact and steady. As a result, this painter can integrate pinks, reds, ochres and violets which in other hands could be self-indulgently over-heated, or just plain fussy. Instead, we are aware of a cool astringency informing the entire picture-plane and which lifts the overall image to a new and discursive level of ‘representation’.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch once made the point that the best art “offers an objective vision of the world and that what matters is not its individuality but its impersonality, this being the best guide we have to the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Thereby it can both humble and edify”. The commonplace, quotidian subject matter in these paintings is without drama. Any drama in Hallam’s work is of consciousness and is to be found in the handling, as if the painter were momentarily shocked to find herself alive.”