The depth and darkness Archer paints are essentially internal. The causeway, the cliff and the flyover, the limitless grey sea, the sunless skies that fill the greater part of each canvas with light and movement, all belong to an inner landscape. What draws the eye is the imagination at work, its transformative energy and purpose, the strange excitement that gives his manmade subjects – flyover, causeway, industrial jetty, and the looming mass of the grounded tanker to which he returns again and again – the kind of mysteriously commanding power earlier generations found in the great romantic poets and painters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Hilary Spurling)