Alan Shipway reviews the exhibition Derek Roberts: Northern Paintings at Inverleith House in Edinburgh, on view through April 14, 2013.

Shipway writes: "It is painting which has decorative qualities, but whose complex visual intensity transcends its being merely decorative. This complexity seems to have to unfold over time for the onlooker like nothing else contemporary: its intense, physical quality, its actuality, has to be seen, or realised, face to face. At the same time as they are startling in their intensity, in the revelation of daylight the paintings are still and quiet, for they are rooted in the place they’re made. Derek has always lived and worked in a relatively isolated moorland situation outside Edinburgh, though it goes without saying his sensibility is sophisticated and urban. The paintings are as capable of recalling Kandinsky or Picasso at the same time as recalling experiences of landscape: perhaps a wood at dusk, or the wind rippling the surface of the water in a reservoir."