Virginia MacKenny is a painter, and like all contemporary painters a large proportion of her work is about painting itself, it's about the surface, paint consistency, the brushstroke, the transparency and opacity of colour and all those things that make painters shiver. She's good at this. She has the kind of understanding of colour that comes from years of experience (especially with blue). I find looking at her paintings to be an absorbing experience and quite intense (if not a little too surface overload, a red blue flicker). However, in her recent show, Foam Along The Waterline at Irma Stern, I wish that the subtle interplay of opaque and transparent colours she employs could have extended to a subtle interplay between opaque and transparent content. While clearly the term 'foam' gives us a big clue as to how one should approach the work, (ie. the washed-up, the jettisoned, the less-than-substantial, what bubbles to the top of the 'water', literally the sea, but also perhaps culture, capitalism and Virginia MacKenny's own life) I found myself struggling with the opacity of the subject, it became hard for me to see through and to make the neccessary jumps to give me that 'interpretation satisfaction'. This isn't all bad at all. Mystery is a good thing, and without good dense foam we would struggle to sleep at night. Some transparency might just have helped, to ease me in.