Fallen tree Watercolour, 2011 60 x 80 cms	Lunch time at the Mermaid Cafe Watercolour, 2010 71 x 120 cms	Station Road, Wakes Colne Watercolour, 2010 38 x 88 cms	Southend on Sea, Summer Watercolour, 2010 72 x 52 cms	Oak Road, Nocturne Watercolour, 2011 90 x 60 cms
Ploughed Field with Viaduct Watercolour, 2010 54 x 75 cms	Gap in the Hedge, Winter Watercolour, 2011 56 x 63 cms	Wind Farm Watercolour, 2011 90 x 60 cms	Towards Sizewell Watercolour, 2011 31 x 32 cms	River Bridge Watercolour, 2011 31 x 32 cms
Blasted Trunk Watercolour, 2011 75 x 50 cms	Bluebells in Chalkney Wood Watercolour, 2011 80 x 120 cms	Fallen Leaves Watercolour, 2011 90 x 78 cms	Colne Valley I Watercolour, 2011 18 x 92 cms	Colne Valley III Watercolour, 2011 50 x 150 cms
Sea wall shadow, Walberswick Watercolour, 2011 25 x 38 cms	Beach Hut Areas under Surveillance Watercolour, 2009 91 x 150 cms	Colchester Road, Chappel Watercolour, 2004 56 x 83 cms	Cold and Damp, Chappel Watercolour, 2008 83 x 99 cms	The Culvert Watercolour, 2008 150 x 90 cms
Walton on the Naze, Cliffs Watercolour, 2007 50 x 135 cms	Red Berries Watercolour, 2011 75 x 50 cms	Steps, Footbridge and Kissing Gate Watercolour, 2011 100 x 75 cms	Behind the barns Watercolour, 2011 38 x 25 cms	Coppiced wood Watercolour, 2011 90 x 45 cms
Tree horizon Watercolour, 2011 26 x 52 cms	Summer Landscape Watercolour, 2011 31 x 32 cms	Chappel Viaduct Watercolour, 2011 31 x 32 cms	Stormy Evening Watercolour, 2011 31 x 32 cms	Rough Sea, Frinton Watercolour, 2010 30 x 45 cms
Abbey Ruins, Whitby Watercolour, 2011 80 x 56 cms	Ice Cream, Robin Hood's Bay Watercolour, 2012 75 x 55 cms	View from Larpool Viaduct towards Whitby Watercolour, 2012 60 x 90 cms	Whitby Bay Watercolour, 2012 40 x 120 cms

There is a large watercolour in this exhibition that is not a typical example of Władysław Mirecki's work Lunchtime at the Mermaid Cafe departs from his usual rural subject matter to concentrate on crowded humanity. The landscape element is reduced to a strip of sea glimpsed over the heads of lunching holidaymakers. But the intense observation of detail here is entirely typical the instantly recognisable, slightly precious gesture of the waiter pouring wine tells its own story of character and situation. The perspective of red awnings creates a dynamic rhythm that recurs in many other watercolours, though we more often encounter it as a receding stretch of shore beside sullen breakers or a winter hedgerow plunging deep into the picture space.

Another seaside subject, Southend on Sea, Summer, shows two people sitting in folding chairs with their backs to us, reading, with the view across the estuary beyond. Their individual personalities are vividly caught with a bare minimum of description. The vista behind them is ravishing; in the foreground is a surprisingly (but, we quickly learn, characteristically) broad and undramatic strip of sand and stones.

Mirecki gravitates naturally to the details of the countryside, to an expanse of dry bracken on a grey winter day, a slope of lush unmown grass, a cluster of bluebells in a spring wood. Quite often there is a road, with markings and traffic signs. If he can introduce a double yellow line that most artists would edit firmly out of a rustic scene, he will include it - and a speed limit sign into the bargain, if one is there. This is how we see the countryside now, whether we like it or not: Mirecki paints with such gentle persuasiveness that we accept the anomalies as part and parcel of a benign world.

This insistence on the banal and the modern as unavoidable intruders into our appreciation of nature is a hallmark of his work. It undercuts the often lyrical beauty of his subjects, but never to the point of constituting a modernist 'irony': Mirecki is too subtle for such tricks One of the wittiest instances of this in the current show is an evocative nocturne, Oak Road Nocturne whose subject is a single telegraph wire spanning a country road under a full moon. The glitter of moonlight on the wet tarmac, the deep shadows, the luminous sky, form a frame for this mundane detail, transforming it into a potent pictorial element, like a line of music in the darkness.

Like many East Anglian painters, he is deeply attached to his home, 'rooted in one dear perpetual place' as Yeats put it. The great railway viaduct almost outside his door at Chappel, on the Essex-Suffolk border, recurs like a leitmotif in many subjects, and although he evidently relishes the elegant rhythm of the long arcade as it strides across the fields, we can guess that he also enjoys the presence of a stark  industrial reminder in the country setting. The viaduct recurs in a panorama of Station Road, Wakes Co/ne, where it provides counterpoint to a line of very ordinary suburban houses and a web of telegraph wires, determinedly mundane elements that Mirecki builds with unforced assurance into a lyrical ode to everyday England.

His almost obsessive enquiry into the detail of things may seem like a recurrence to the nineteenth century, but his concern with jarring signs of local officialdom, like his preference for large formats, is entirely of the present day, and conveys a muscularity of response that pervades every aspect of his work. That he can translate ideas we associate with the minute and miniature on to huge sheets of paper, and retain a touching sense of intimacy while making large-scale and assertive statements is an impressive achievement.
 
Andrew Wilton
Visiting Research Fellow, Tate Britain. Formerly Keeper of the British Collection, Tate Gallery.