When John Doherty stopped working as an architect in the late ’70s and began painting, it wasn’t to let his imagination roam or bulldoze. Painting was a way of leaving the imagination—that endless drawing board—behind. Nowadays, instead of drawing what is to be, he makes paintings of existing buildings, where the architect seems to have gone missing. With a draftsman’s eye for detail and a camera for an assistant, Doherty takes undistinguished shops, houses, and pubs as models for his paintings—doors at odd angles, window sills going their own way. In Pink and Blue, Ardfert, Co. Kerry, 1988,