John Duffin’s Barrow cityscapes are bleak, garish-skied and strangely disquieting.

As if painted in the wake of some antiseptic holocaust, when one can now have a quiet, content life in the old, familiar and now quite empty city.

Sometimes the setting seems like a trap waiting to close on a lone human figure.

I wonder how much of this is intended. Maybe none of it. There’s a (perhaps not deliberate) lack of effect in these paintings that encourages me to conjure up all sorts of sinister meanings.