Like your dreams, watercolour can be casually ruined - an injudicious mark here, an uncontrolled run there, and your landscape has become a stainscape or a pissscape. Gough rehearses the moves of the careful amateur, doing it by the book. These images make a point of not taking things too far- they purposefully don’t take risks with flashy displays or arty pseudo-Turner gestures. They are examination pieces submitted for a licence to make art, initiation tests for another School of London. In this way, Gough reveals his true ancestor to be a painter such as Walter Richard Sickert, an actor turned professional artist whose scenes of metropolitan banality and popular pleasures have the same laboured, obsessive quality that Gough builds into his own views of London. When the writer Patricia Cornwell recently tore apart a Sickert painting seeking evidence to prove that the artist was Jack the Ripper, she illustrated, in the most graphic way possible, the gulf that separates the Londoner from the tourist. Cornwell, the tourist par excellence, searches in vain for the secret of the city. Richard Sickert and Michael Gough are the Londoners who know that all views of London are bridges flung across the chasm at its heart. The secret of London, as Patricia Cornwell has inadvertently discovered, is in the slit.