Robbie Bushe, a post-graduate student at Edinburgh College of Art, shows that he, too, can haul us into a world of his own in his first one-man show, on the walls of the Traverse Theatre restaurant, Edinburgh. Not a pretty world, to be sure, home from home in the Grassmarket, peopled it seems by beery slobs and hennaed sluts whose taps drip, dishes lie unwashed, and where you’re likely to find fag ends stubbed out in the congealed remains of last night’s tandoori supper. It’s bed-sitville, or some other tacky corner of the urban ghetto, and enough of his small paintings are selling – at an average of £100 – to suggest that chords are being struck, bells rung, carefree times remembered from all too many scruffy yesterdays.

The pen and ink work, as grubby as dingy bed linen, disappears under a blotch of colour – usually her red hair – or drowns under pallid washes. We’re in a lazy laundrette – at least something’s getting washed – or tucked up in bed, or feeding our faces, or locked in the lavatory, where there is the real sense that somebody has at last found some space to themselves.

Yet despite the comedy, the witty and jaundiced observation of life in the raw, many of these paintings reminded me how painful it could be to be young and gauche and rejected and betrayed at that moment when coming of age felt like the end of the world. His voyeurs – and he recruits us to their number – are neither sinister nor disturbed; we are merely faces at the windows looking out on his disenchanted world of gooseberryed lovers and shattered dreams. Mr. Bushe has something to say has started to speak.

W. GORDON SMITH  Observer Scotland, 8 April 1990