As for acrylics, they are of course a more versatile medium than my short assessment above could credit. I worked in acrylics for 10 years. Paintings can be good or bad in both mediums, pretty much equally.

Yes acrylic does normally dry faster than oils, but where the acrylic painter might prefer to work a passage longer or slower (say in delicately blending tones), there are retarder mediums, which slow the drying, depending how much you add to the mixing solvent. These have, incidentally, an oily, viscous quality, not unlike washing-up liquid (which you could probably also try – if you’re in a Willem de Kooning mood for experiment…)

But that said I generally agree with Brody’s assessment. For me, Humphery is brave for continually trying to accommodate more painterly qualities or issues in his work, for trying to frame painting in a pluralistic way – the Oehlen call seems particularly apt in this respect – but at the same time the mix rarely seems quite right – unlike Oehlen. It’s something to do with the content, which is either too programatic or too eccentric, perhaps personal. There’s either too much going on or not enough. It may be the price of over-ambition or just over-theorising.

The quote on Immendorff is telling in that Humphery identifies why the artist cannot allow his style to get too close to socialist realism or even political cartoon and so backs into a ‘refined anarchistic connoisseurship’ or ‘crappiness’ (effectively distinguishes Neo- Expressionism from plain Expressionism) but fails to see that this nevertheless takes ‘an interest’ in painting’s qualities – although not conventionally, a ‘good’ or approved one. Even being ‘bad’ ends up taking a certain amount of ‘refinement’ as he acknowledges.

For the postmodern or eclectic painter, the challenge would seem to be to show that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ depend on how they’re arranged, which content is allowed. But saying there are any number of goods or bads only presents the painter with too many, and at best the painter then tries to display a kind of arbitrary or fitful encounter. This seems to be the territory Humphery is intent on exploring, but I’m not convinced he’s entirely comfortable with it.