West Bay near Bridport, which provides the principal focus for Lowery’s paintings, has long been the resort of artists. Paul Nash was a frequent visitor when living locally and in 1934, the surrealist, Eileen Agar rented a cottage there for the summer. It is a small English port of singular visual contrasts, which embeds itself mysteriously in the mind. Certainly this has been its effect on Alex Lowery, who has been painting West Bay for the last eight years.

Flattened spaces, simplified forms, heightened colours, a compelling formal precision and painterly subtleties, these are the characteristics which attach themselves to Alex Lowery’s work and to the work of the American realists, Alex Katz and Edward Hopper, whose influence Lowery acknowledges. However, as the critic, David Cohen, commented there is also a surprising analogy to be made between Lowery and the Italian Futurist artist, De Chirico. “West Bay has…become something quite marvellous in Lowery’s hands, like De Chirico’s Ferrara, an actual place, but every bit as unreal as an invented city…, the town has been transformed quite simply, by being rendered as form.