As an armchair traveller my knowledge of America is through film and TV. Because of it I have never had a desire to go there even though I know that what I see is not representative of the country as a whole. After her successful show at the Waterford Municipal Gallery, Clare Scott has left the landscape of her native Tramore, and gone further afield with her show of new paintings “Road Trip” in The Mary St. Gallery, Waterford. We are invited on a journey in America starting in San Francisco and taking in the Sierra Nevada, then south, through the Mojave desert and on into Arizona. East then through the Navajo Nation and into Georgia O’Keefe’s New Mexico. This is no ordinary journey, we can join in or drop out at any time with an image which for us tells the whole story. Yet we cannot forget the visual scenes before or after as each snapshot is representative of the whole. While photographs were used as reference to be worked on in the studio at a later date these are not photorealism paintings in the sense that Scott is on a personal journey which lends her own feelings to any particular scene. She selects her own individual views in a way which is redolent of Edward Hopper (1882 -1967). Sparsely populated, figures when they appear seem not to inhabit the place where they happen to be. Paintings based on photographs taken from a car take on a new dimension as sections are viewed through glass or in wing mirrors. Unlike Hopper, Scott’s paintings are small in scale yet the sense of space is quite evident in the landscapes. The sense of aloneness is strong in each scene, meticulously rendered with a lack of expression in the brushwork accentuating the sense of timelessness. Modern everyday manmade items just happen to be there without comment good or bad. That is the viewers job as is narrative. A table set for one, a rose, a row of post boxes, empty roads. Vast landscapes with big skies. The larger paintings are of panoramic pastiches like a journey within a journey. Recognisable to those who have been there, I’m told by a passerby, who must have been there. The interiors, sparsely populated, show evidence of occupation accentuating the feeling of aloneness. Mostly of motel rooms and hostels a bed unmade, a locker, a shadow on the wall, a window with blue sky have a suggestion of transience. Where will the road take us to next, what will we see? I now feel it is perhaps un-necessary to leave my armchair.