I WAS initially in two minds about whether to review this exhibition, since both artists are still young students at NMMU. But what a revelation it turned out to be. McLeod, a first-year architecture student, studied art at Victoria Park High until matric, and she evinces a refreshing appreciation for the work of the Impressionists and their successors with her brooding cityscapes.

The pick of her paintings is an acrylic, Night on the Town, in which a flow of brown and white brushstrokes draws the eye to the three red-framed doors of a nightclub.

These are distorted, adding to the sense of their enticing the long, amorphous queue of people lining the street into the venue.

She achieves a wonderful luminosity in the yellow, green and red bars of light above the doors.

Cars flash by down the dark street, while a strange red mist rises against a black sky.

In Bistro, she again draws on the cityscapes of French-based masters like Van Gogh and Monet, though working in darker tones.

Here four sketchily painted figures sit at two pavement tables under bright umbrellas. But they are outside in the relative dark.

The focus, really, is on great planes of yellow and white light which glow through windows from within the bistro, enticing patrons – like the two in the doorway – to enter.

I also enjoyed Red Bench, an oil of three young people, two of them sitting at either end of a long bench, the other on a chair beside them, facing away from the viewer.

A scooter is parked nearby. But what are they looking at?

Again, McLeod has made shop windows a focal point – only here they are filled not with merchandise, but with wonderfully weird abstract shapes.

Art student Michael Lockett taps into something very close to my heart: rock music.

The exhibition really gets its title from his fine portraits of three music icons from different eras.

First, from the 1950s, there is Elvis Presley. This finely honed charcoal drawing of the rock ’n roll legend is shown against a bright red gouache background, the colour accentuated by his slicked-back black hair and black shirt.

Then, from the late 1960s, is Jimi Hendrix, a superb portrait of the left-handed guitar guru, seen against a field of yellow.

The drawing here is superb, capturing Hendrix in contemplative mood, a fag between his fingers, his fingers to his lips.

And, from the 1990s, comes Kurt Cobain, another excellent charcoal drawing, against blue this time, of the tragic grunge rocker, blond hair falling across a troubled face.

But the piece de resistance is a large, untitled painting which contains echoes of the Pop art of the ’60s.

Here, on a large square canvas, Hendrix is again the main focus, a guitar lying across his black, yellow and orange hair.

Among the other musicians, some of them upside down in this swirling tribute to the rock era, appear to be the likes of Sid Vicious, Jim Morrison and David Bowie.

People interested in this era will thoroughly enjoy the mood Lockett creates through these works.