Newton himself describes this process as one of distilling conceptual ideas (whether triggered by historic paintings, childhood memories, or whatever else) into abstract schematic forms. Encrypted in these forms are aspects that become more pictorially or figuratively resolved in later paintings. Sometimes these can take on a 3-dimensional form, but then they are more like stage props than sculpture and could more accurately be described as solid paintings, which is how I view them. An example is Newton’s installation Return to Sender, one of many dramatic punctuations throughout his 2023 solo show Double Barrel. A life-size set of New York brownstone steps lead both ominously and comically to a floating lilac door, above which a trompe l’oeil replica of a restaurant sign near his studio reads, ‘Hong Kong’. Beyond this hand-painted assemblage (regardless of whether he is working in two or three dimensions, Newton always remains a painter!) renditions of the same steps subsequently reappear in paintings. Various versions of particular motifs recur frequently in his work, orchestrated in different ways and driven by different emotional responses. In characteristically self-deprecating fashion, he has described this process as, “essentially a kind of daydreaming”, in which, “things that stick around in the mind for long enough for some reason become folded into the work in the hope of finding some kind of lyrical synthesis of them”.

The ‘things that stick around in his mind’ cover a broad and deep range, including: the colours of milkshakes; the looped background aesthetics of Hanna-Barbera cartoons; the sun baked vernacular of movie backlots; the once pristine precincts and plazas of his suburban childhood and the brutalism of his teenage haunts like Birmingham’s Bull Ring; films by Powell and Pressburger, Mike Nichols, John Boorman, John Schlesinger, Robert Altman and David Lynch; the schlock TV of Quincy M E, Columbo and Crossroads; the interiors of working men’s clubs and dowdy pubs; early video games; Brutus shirts and Sta-Prest trousers; American muscle cars; contrasting styles of music from jazz to post-punk. But overlaid onto all this are literary references that range from Balzac to Thoreau and Charles Dickens, and from Henry Miller to Saul Bellow, Paul Auster, and Ian McEwan. He also has a deep knowledge of art history that informs what he describes as “riffing with influences” from Caravaggio, Vermeer and Victorian genre painting to Black Mountain College, and from Duchamp to Paul Thek, and “the three M’s” (as he respectfully calls them), Mike Kelley, Mike Nelson, and his friend Matt Crawley.

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This by no means exclusive or complete list reveals a very culturally-specific and gendered perspective and focus. It’s one I identify easily with––we are a generation apart but both working-class Brummie lads who grew up in Birmingham’s hinterland with dreams of escape fed largely by American popular culture and eventually by art school. (Incidentally, I realise now, in a way I couldn’t have then, how particular the British experience of American popular culture is, or at least was for our generations, born in the 1950s and 60s. Americans of the same generation experienced it differently in just the way that their experience of and response to the Beatles or British movies were very different to ours.)  In this sense, Newton’s work can be seen to be highly context specific. If you are of the background and generation that immediately recognises its imagery, drawn from iconic fragments of proletarian popular culture, these are the hook you get caught on. But, as you get reeled in, you are pulled away from familiar waters by the new insights and connections that are prompted by the familiarity of the signs you recognise. To mix metaphors, these can then be the take-off point for a flight of lyrical imagination.

These specificities might suggest that Newton’s paintings are accessible only to a limited audience that share his cultural references, but their seductive materiality counteracts this. He speaks of “the rolling of the creative dice, requiring a leap of faith”. He means a faith that the specifics that trigger him will still communicate the general through the work to a viewer unaware of them. To put it another way, the thing that the work comes out of isn’t the thing that it’s ‘about’. There are many references in Newton’s work to facades and thresholds, their materiality, but also their artifice. They invite an exploration that at any given turn might be halted by dead ends that intrigue and redirect attention. So the reading of the work in a contemporary context and by a diverse audience isn’t necessarily dependent on knowledge of any of its specific references, even though the work itself is highly dependent on their presence in the mind of the artist in the act of making it. The idiosyncratic or autobiographical particulars don’t necessarily dominate. Rather, the engagingly immersive installation and combinations of works, the seductive qualities of their surfaces, which Newton refers to as his “primal, experiential joy in materiality”, and, perhaps most of all, the elevation of the mundane (“from the gutter to the stars”), all communicate to viewers in their reading of the work, even if the specifics aren’t necessarily recognisable from their own particular background, gender, or generation.