This book is a retrospective look at the work of the painter Jack Donovan. It also features and indepth essay and extensive interview with the artist. Jack Donovan was a true artist because he thought and acted in paint.

What we made of his paintings did not centrally concern him; his business was putting the marks on the canvas. The realm of interpretation he left to the spectator, content with the capacity of his paintings to speak for themselves.

What they speak of - those great runs of clowns, funfairs and circuses - is happy innocence and simple enjoyment. But again and again the runs are disrupted by images in which innocence is compromised and abused, where the world of nostalgia is assailed by the world of bitter experience. In these disturbing paintings Donovan is never strident; the impassive hand and eye conjoin to record, pace Beckett, how it is on this bitch of an earth. (from the intro by Gerry Dukes)