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From: charl sterne Category: Art Date: 19 July 2007 Time: 05:47 AM Review: http://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/ Ms Vine didn't attend the opening, no-shows being de rigeur amongst the celebs she depicts. An opening in Oxford is much like openings elsewhere, although you probably see more provincial types, artyy people who left art school in London 30 years ago and set up shop in nice Oxford. Speaking of Oxford it's a sadder old place without its students, plagued by language school kids and tourists, full of dry sandwich shops. Vine's paintings are best when they are drippy and smudgy and small. The biggers ones are harder to like, although all together, and she has hung a lot of them, they form an arresting and clear display, many people painted blankly with big googly eyes and flat bright colours, the signature drips standing in for expressionism in the most obvious way, a reference to absent painterliness. They are pictures, which sometimes as in the one of Spiderman reach a level of blankness, of being just a picture of a picture, and make you wonder at the nihilism of the painter and art, and thus obtain an abstract charm.