Cornerhouse Projects / Ian McKay @ Cornerhouse Cafe/Bar, Manchester, until 17 Jun

Ah, summer. When you can’t move in Primark for flip-flops even though it’s raining outside and the hottest days are spent in freezing air-conditioned offices with people you despise. Proper holidays involve a plane (or at the very least a tunnel) don’t they?  Well let’s face it, even if we had the energy, we’re too broke.

There is always the great British seaside. Since the introduction of railways in the mid-19^th century and the first organised excursions from industrial cities, the seaside has occupied a particular place in the country’s psyche: we love the Wimpy bars and slot machines, faded neons and abandoned lidos.

This is the focus for a small exhibition of paintings by Manchester-based Ian McKay, currently on display on the walls of Cornerhouse’s café and bar as part of their Cornerhouse Projects programme. McKay uses the general format of a landscape, the canvases divided into sand, sea and sky with overlaid printed text – ‘All the fun of the Pier,’ ‘Do not feed the pigeons’ or just simply ‘Sand Sea.’ The text speaks to the postcard clichés of the coast; the paintings use the typefaces found in fish and chip shops or B&B signs. The washed-out colours, however, say volumes about both the jolliness and melancholia of these still sometimes depressed places on the edge, and are based on colour studies the artist makes on his travels. The faded greens, for example, he observed in Brighton; the light blues come from Scarborough.

The paintings, in fact, are just one element of a much larger body of work, including prints, photographs and postcards, by McKay, whose previous career was as an exhibition sign-writer, screen printer and typographer. After being made redundant after 22 years in the industry, McKay started to focus on his own studio work. Remembering childhood trips to Towyn, Abergele, he started to look at the strong seaside photographic tradition in the Northwest from photographers like Martin Parr and Tony Ray-Jones. He began to return to some of these places, taking his own observational images. Particularly influenced by architecture and the colours of broken-down signage, he was also looking at the work of American painters such as Ed Ruscha and Jasper Johns as a starting point for his painted work. Interestingly, McKay now uses vinyl to create the text in his paintings, the very material that put him out of business in the first place.