Paul Doran at Hillsboro Fine Art

 

The following review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 28 August 2016.

Paul Doran makes paintings that are demanding of the viewer. His earlier work often consisted of coils of paint that looked as if they'd emerged unmediated from their tubes. Process art was in vogue and Doran's work seemed part of that academic movement in which the medium took precedence over the message. But he has moved on and these days he creates art that engages the viewer emotionally, inviting comparisons with Howard Hodgkin, an artist he much admires. He has eschewed titles completely leaving us free to encounter these works honestly. The dark, dense, abstract images in oil on multiple layers of overlapping board are topped off with a Baconesque flourish in bright acrylic often on a sheet of archival paper. Lurking within the overall abstraction there is a recurring bird motif and the layer of paper that tops many of the paintings contains ghostly photographic images of apples, egg-shells, dappled shadows, and even an opened artbook. These small (around 14 inches square) works have an impact that belies their size. They have the kind of visual heft that you find in old icon paintings.

Hillsboro Fine Art

Mon-Fri: 10.30am-6.00pm

Sat: 10.30am-3.30pm

Phone: 01-8788242

 

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Source - Eddie Kennedy

A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 28 February 2016


Source, the title of Eddie Kennedy's new show, invites speculation. It could refer to the sea, the source of all life, that appears in many of the paintings. Or it could refer to North Mayo itself which thanks to the commendable support of the Ballinglen Arts Foundation is becoming to Irish landscape artists what Mont Sainte-Victoire was to Cezanne - a rich source of inspiration. Luminaries such as Hughie O'Donoghue, Donald Teskey, and Pat Harris have recently engaged with its troubled waters, its jagged coastline, and it's haunted past. Kennedy is the latest to be drawn the region. A Tipperary native he has abandoned the placid pastures of the Golden Vale to focus on the seas around Blacksod Bay and the imposing presence of Nephin. The predominant colours are the creamy white of the sea and the blue grey of the sky. These are bedecked with flecks of colour and the occasional bold horizontal of green or black. Kennedy resists the label of landscape painter but rather sees himself as one who experiences the landscape and transmutes this into art. The fruits of his encounter with the wild West are surprisingly tranquil paintings, restful on the eye and soothing to the soul.

 

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Eilís O'Connell: Profile of the Artist

 

A slightly edited version of this article appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 3 May 2015.

You turn right off the Inniscara Road between Cork and Dripsey to get to Eilís O'Connell's studio - a converted creamery perched on a hill. The large and handsome steel gates open into a property well-furnished with examples of her formidable art - a stern woven steel piece here, a curvaceous purple and blue creation there. Their presence a surreal shock against the lush green backdrop of the Lee Valley. In this bucolic location one of Ireland's most successful artists creates her internationally acclaimed sculptures.

When the history of Cork's philistinism about art is being written, the saga of Eilis O'Connell's Great Wall of Kinsale will surely merit a chapter. The desecration of her 1988 sculpture has been well documented - the local council (amongst many other transgressions) painted over her corten steel structure despite her specific instructions not to do so. She is still angry nearly 30 years later: "It was torture, the whole thing was torture. I get physically ill passing it." During the subsequent controversy she had stones thrown at her, her car tyres slashed and was even refused service in some shops by the good citizens of Kinsale. It's ironic indeed to look over her career since that protracted debacle and see that the offending sculpture proved to be the foundation stone for her success at home and especially abroad. It was responsible for her winning the competition that led to her monumental Secret Station in Cardiff Bay. "I was taken seriously in Britain due to my 1988 piece The Great Wall of Kinsale. They could see that I worked big. They loved it, and I got great credit for it."

Her string of subsequent high-profile commissions in the UK include Vowel of Earth Dreaming its Root, in London Docklands and the award-winning Nyama in Bishopsgate. She has particular affection for her playful Pero's Bridge in Bristol. "That bridge is mad." She sees it occasionally as a backdrop in English TV programmes. "I get such a kick out of that." She also continues to reap a rich harvest internationally. In 2002 her large bronze Unfold was lent by the Cass Foundation to the Venice Biennale and her smaller sculptures were shown at the Guggenheim Museum. She has also shown at the Paris and Sao Paolo Biennales and is currently trying to finalise a large project in Hong Kong. Leaving Sean Scully to the Americans, there is a very strong argument for declaring her our best-known and most successful artist on the international stage. She hasn't been idle at home either. Since moving back to Ireland in 2002 she has completed Reedpod a 13.5 meter sculpture for Lapps Quay in Cork and her recent polished mirror steel tribute to E. S. Walton in Trinity. She is amongst the blessed of Aosdana, a founder of the Cork Sculpture Factory, a former member of the Arts Council and a long-standing member of the RHA.

Born in Derry, O'Connell moved to Cork with her family when she was ten. She always wanted to be an artist (three of her uncles painted) and pestered her parents to send her to art classes at the Crawford College of Art when she was 12. Later studying at the Crawford she came under the influence of the sculptor John Burke. He was a charismatic and influential teacher and an enthusiast for the hard-edged abstraction of David Smith. Burke's own career was dissolved in alcohol - a not uncommon fate for a visual artist in Cork. O'Connell's early work was influenced by Burke's modernism but she evolved into her own woman - with a sensibility more drawn to organic forms. She remains grateful for the encounter however, recalling with a smile his shouting "the fucking worst show you ever did" across a crowded Hendrik's Gallery opening. A typical Burke incident. Another Cork artist who influenced her was Maurice Desmond - for the example he showed her in living the life of the artist without compromise. "Maurice was the only full-time artist in Cork at the time. He showed me that it could be done." After a distinguished student career, various awards and fellowships followed. She was determined to broaden her horizons: "As a young artist I was always desperate to get out of Ireland." She was granted a fellowship at The British School at Rome in 1983, and a P.S.I. Fellowship for New York from the Irish Arts Council in 1988. After New York she won a two-year residency at Delfina Studios in London. "Delfina Studios were amazing, every 6 months we had to open our studios and I got to know people very quickly and started applying for shows and commissions." She ended staying in London until 2002 - settling in Deptford. Then a tragedy disrupted the smooth flow of her career. In 2001 her long-term boyfriend Herbie died suddenly. She was thrown by this event: "I had never been unhappy before". She felt the need to return to Ireland and to the support of family and friends. For a while she couldn't work: "I did feel that I'd never make another thing." But eventually she got back to work (completing a gravestone for Herbie) and adjusted to her new life. "I have discovered that solitude was the making of me." Although back living in Ireland, O'Connell has no romantic notions about the place. She doesn't particularly embrace being Irish: "My nationality is not an issue - I feel European." She maintains that "Ireland is a very hard country to be an artist in."

She looks outward to the international scene: "What's Gormley doing? What's Kapoor doing?"

There are two strands to O'Connell's career as an artist. In addition to the public and monumental side that makes the money, there is the smaller work that is best demonstrated by her critically acclaimed Haptic show at the RHA in 2011. Her larger works are created in her spacious well-equipped studio and adjacent barn. She is the first artist I have ever met with her own fork-lift. She also has a small studio on Crete where she creates smaller hand-worked pieces.

"The quality of light there is incredible and the silence of no power tools, I look at everything in a different way. I have no materials only the local amazing beeswax, in a way, the limited resources have given me great freedom."

She always thinks big - seeing virtually all her small pieces as scale models for larger works. "Almost every single thing I make is a model for something that could possibly be made big." Her public work she sees as a way of counter-balancing the ugliness of much modern development. She describes her large piece in London's docklands as "an organic antidote to a very ugly location". She prefers her work outside in the real world - subject to ageing and weathering. "In a museum it's like still being in the head." She sets a lot of store on the after care and maintenance of her public work and bemoaned the appalling state of John Burke's graffiti bedecked sculpture at the Wilton roundabout in Cork. "We have a whole culture of non-maintenance."

It's hard to pin O'Connell down to any particular style or school. There's a hint of Brancusi here and a touch of Henry Moore there (look at Sacrificial Anode in her Haptic show) - and now and then she goes back to her more hard-edged mentors such as David Smith and her late tutor John Burke. She is a restless and eclectic artist often just going where her experiments with materials take her. She is constantly playing with the possibilities of bronze, steel, epoxy resin, mirror polished stainless steel, and even Kevlar - the carbon fibre material used in bullet-proof vests. She once took possession of 1.5 kilometres of stainless steel cable. After leaving art college she worked for a while with hand-made paper - a medium she revisits occasionally. A striking example can be seen in the upcoming RHA annual show. She does what she feels like doing and what she did yesterday may be radically different to what she does today. She refuses to be a predictable, easily marketed product and pours scorn on artists like Tony Cragg who "keeps doing the same thing because he has to supply 55 galleries".

Most of the small bronzes in O'Connell's current show in Hillsboro Fine Art originated in Crete but were finished in her Cork studio. Some suggest teepees and she concedes that "the forms are about refuge and shelter". But she is impatient with those who look for metaphor or meaning in any specific work: "It has no significance whatsoever. It's just a yoke." A statement that typifies O'Connell's lack of arty preciousness. The title of the show is Khôra - a particularly slippery Greek term. You can travel from Plato to Derrida for a definition and still be none the wiser. Perhaps Martin Heidigger's formulation is the most applicable: a "clearing" in which being happens or takes place. O'Connell's work is equally difficult to define. She cannot be confined to any particular "ism". It is abstract but often with figurative resonances. It is classically severe but often with sexual intimations. Perhaps it's best to conclude that her sculptures exist, like Platonic forms, purely as things of beauty for our restful contemplation.

John P. O'Sullivan

 

 

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Gwen O'Dowd - Tonn

A slightly edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 12th April 2015.


The power of water and its eroding impact on the landscape has long been the focus of Gwen O'Dowd's art. Twenty years ago she did a series on the Grand Canyon where the Colorado River has been carving its masterpiece for the past 17 million years. Her lengthy and accomplished Uaimh series of paintings followed, showing rock caves around our coast sculpted by the pounding of waves. Apart from some recent avian excursions, she has persisted with this rich source of imagery for the bulk of her career. Her current show is entitled Tonn, the Irish term for wave. But don't go looking for wavy verisimilitude in these paintings. In fact, in a number of them you'll struggle to find any waves at all. What they offer is a rich variety of near abstract images where sky, sea and shore are juxtaposed ambiguously for our visual delectation. There's more than a suggestion of Turner's seascapes in these works, especially in the splashes of luxuriant orange and green amidst the spume and spray. Impressive.

Hillsboro Fine Art

 

John P. O'Sullivan

 

 

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Peter Burns at Hillsboro Fine Art

           Lies Upon Sleepers

A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 2 March 2014.

Peter Burns is a young Dublin artist whose reputation received a deserved boost in the Futures 12 show at the RHA in 2012.  He studied both sculpture and painting at NCAD and his current exhibition demonstrates this versatility.  In addition to the fifteen paintings on show there are around 40 small brightly coloured sculptures of pink fleshy heads, fabulous beasts and sundry exotica.  Burns artistic realm embraces the grotesque and the fantastical.  The paintings contain references to art history particularly, and to literature and myth.  The grotesqueries are rendered playful by the lightness of the colours used and the humour of the tiny throwaway details.  Lies Upon Sleepers, his take on Fuseli's Nightmare, is a macabre exception to this general playfulness. There is a density of incident in a lot of the work that suggests Hieronymous Bosch - and there's a clear link between Burns' Demesne and The Garden of Earthly Delights.  The self-portrait of the artist bestriding the mountains in Nemesis is surely Gulliver's reincarnation.  But these connections shouldn't be overstated.  Burns' work is highly original and full of humour.  The latter a quality much neglected in the art world where po-faced earnestness often holds sway.

Hillsboro Fine Art
Mon-Fri: 10.30am-6.00pm
Sat: 10.30am-3.30pm
Phone: 01-8788242

John P. O'Sullivan

Half Light at Hillsboro Fine Art

Lamb Series

An edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 17 November 2013.


Paddy Graham is one of the great old warriors of Irish art. His canvases are battlegrounds marked by the blood, sweat and tears he expends in the act of creation.  Religious iconography, nudes, pages from sketchbooks, cryptic phrases, and traces of earlier endeavours jostle for position. The man from Mullingar is still struggling with the sacred and the profane but this exhibition also shows a more meditative side. The Half Light series consists of three large diptychs inspired by the sea off the coast of Mayo.  These are not conventional seascapes but rather recreations of the feelings engendered by Graham's coastal encounters. They invite contemplation in much the same way as Mark Rothko's (a painter much admired by Graham) work does.  Two of the works are predominantly grey and formidably austere.  The third is an ethereal lime green with a jagged grey gash in the middle. The accompanying Lamb series comprise six smaller pieces where grey again predominates but this time the austerity is compromised by sacred hearts and gaping crotches. The Lamb of God contending with the sins of the world.

The Dublin Galleries - Strategies for Survival

Sean McSweeney and Writer (Photo:  Paddy Benson)

The epicentre of the Irish art market is a car park off Kildare Street in Dublin 2.  Park your car there and you will find most of the major players within a radius of 200 metres.  These include the big three auctioneers: Adams, de Veres and Whytes and three of the most prominent commercial galleries:  Taylor Galleries, the Kerlin Gallery and the Oliver Sears Gallery.  The RHA is nearby and the lower end of South Frederick Street has a cluster of smaller galleries including the Leinster Gallery where I once picked up a gem by George Campbell.  As well-fed and watered barristers wend their way back to their Mercs from the clubs and restaurants around Stephen's Green they may be distracted by the sight of a Paul Henry in the window of Adams; or further down Kildare Street they might catch a glimpse of one of Sean McSweeney's moody bogscapes in Taylor Galleries.  Lubricated for artistic appreciation and careless of cost some may arrest their progress to add to their collections.

During the good times the juxtapositioning of these auction houses and galleries formed a lucrative nexus.  The auction houses made money both from dead artists, like Yeats and Dan O'Neill, and from the resale of such popular living artists as Robert Ballagh and Donald Teskey.   A Ballagh painting entitled My Studio was sold at Whytes for €96,000 in 2004.  At the galleries prices were adjusted upwards (mostly at the artists' behest) to reflect what they were achieving at auction.  And so the art boom was born.  Such was the feeding frenzy that the government was forced (Ballagh was a prominent advocate) to introduce a droit de suite scheme (artists get a percentage of auction price) to redistribute some of the largesse from the auctions.  The scheme was confined to living artists however and to work sold for more than €3,000.  Its net result was to make rich artists richer.  An irony not appreciated, I suspect, by the left-leaning Ballagh.  The single biggest beneficiary from the scheme was the hardly impecunious Louis le Brocquy (while he was still alive).

But those halcyon days are over.  The former profitable symbiosis between gallery and auctioneer has broken down as both parties struggle to capture their share of a dwindling market.  The recession has hit very hard.  Slower to slump than the property market it has now surpassed it in the severity of the decline.  Most involved would agree that prices have dropped by more than 50%.  The hardest hit has been work by living artists (there are exceptions, Basil Blackshaw's work continues to do well), and of those the more abstract suffer the most.  For example, a Felim Egan bought for €10K in 2007 sold recently at de Vere's for €3.5k.

But the hard times are much harder for the galleries.  Art continues to sell briskly at all the auction houses - albeit at sharply reduced prices.  The same is not true for commercial galleries selling contemporary art.  Galleries cannot just reduce prices for prominent artists as to do so would cause real problems with previous purchasers of these artists.  Some galleries will sustain the illusion of maintaining prices but will be quick to do a deal at a substantially reduced cost.  Face has been saved, and reputations secured.  However, the buying public in general are looking for bargains at auctions and neglecting the galleries.


So how are the galleries dealing with the sharp downturn in their fortunes?  Surprisingly there have been few casualties in Dublin.  The Rubicon has moved the centre of its operations to Brussells but still maintains a Dublin office.  Otherwise all the main Dublin galleries are still trading although many have cut down the number of solo shows and there has been a plethora of group shows featuring gallery artists - a kind of greatest hits approach.  Cork has not been so lucky.  Its two commercial galleries, the Fenton and the Vangard have perished in this chill wind - although other factors influenced the Fenton's closure.  These galleries frequently hosted sell out shows during the boom times - showing artists such as Tony O'Malley, Charles Tyrrell, and Sean McSweeney.  It's a sad sad situation that our second city, and erstwhile European City of Culture, can't sustain a commercial gallery.

The galleries that have survived have had to adapt.  It was customary for Taylor Galleries to sell out shows by its celebrated roll call of artists.  These days the red dots are sporadic at best, although there's still the occasional exception such as Sean McSweeney's last show.  John Taylor acknowledges the decline in the market and maintains that both his gallery and many of his artists are "living off the fat" of the good days. .  He relies on the Irish market almost exclusively and has had to devise strategies for the changed times.  He is reluctant to reduce prices as he feels this would be unfair to earlier buyers.  However some of his artists are changing to smaller formats to make their work financially accessible.  He also plans to open an original print section some time in 2014.  This would sell etchings and lithographs made by gallery artists and selected outsiders.

Hidden behind a discreet door in a lane off South Anne Street, the Kerlin Gallery is (according to Lonely Planet) "the ultimate statement in cool".  It doesn't exactly employ a barker to draw in the casual passerby.  Art for them is a serious business.  I remember an early visit when I was puzzling over some work by abstract artist Sean Shanahan.  "This is not for beginners" I was informed by director David Fitzgerald.  And he wasn't joking. Inside you'll find mainly conceptual and abstract art from a mixture of Irish and international artists.  Sean Scully is the jewel in their crown but you'll find work by fashionable conceptual artists such as Liam Gillick also.  A lot of the work it shows is more suited to museums than the domestic market.  You could surmise that the Kerlin has been the least impacted by the recession of all the Irish galleries.  It has always looked abroad for sales and it regularly attends art fairs in London, New York and the European mainland.  They are currently showing work by Willie Doherty, Liam Gillick and others at Art Basel and by Sean Scully in Mougins in the South of France.  They also have a  substantial backer in share holder Patrick McGillen, which may insulate them from total dependence on the market place.  Requests for information about how they're managing in the current climate are ignored by director John Kennedy.  Their published accounts take advantage of the veil available to small companies.

The Oliver Sears Gallery is the new kid on the block.  It has taken over the old Ib Jorgensen premises on Molesworth Street - opposite the Masonic Lodge.  The gallery opened in 2010 in the teeth of the economic gale.  It has built up a stable of substantial contemporary figures such as Hughie O'Donoghue, Colin Davidson, Patrick O'Reilly and Donald Teskey.  The latter has been one of the best-selling artists in the country over the past five years.  Although trading has been tough they have still managed to turn a profit in 2012 - albeit a "modest one" according to its owner.  Sears is not afraid to mix his media, frequently showing furniture and recently putting on an entire craft-based show.   A straw in the wind for a change in the market direction may be the opening of SO Fine Art Editions beside Keogh's on South Anne Street.  This is being run jointly by Sears and Catherine O'Riordan, late of the Graphic Studio Gallery.  It specialises in original prints, photography and sculpture.  The owners are hoping that art lovers loath to make the big investment in oil paintings can find satisfaction in these less expensive options.

Outside the Golden Triangle around Stephen's Green (or now perhaps, as Oliver Sears suggests, the Bermuda Triangle) other commercial galleries are trying different things.  The Kevin Kavanagh is increasingly looking abroad for sales as is the Green on Red - attending art fairs and putting in the hard yards.  The Cross Gallery, on Francis Street, has opened a coffee shop to get people onto the premises.  Hillsboro Fine Art in Parnell Square is not solely dependent on the Irish market or on Irish artists.  Over fifty percent of the artists they sell are non-Irish and include such luminaries as Anthony Caro and Gerhard Richter.  Of their Irish artists Michael Warren continues to sell well in Europe.  Also, owner John Daly finds that his core Irish buyers remain loyal and continue to snap up certain artists - he cited Paddy Graham as an example.  Other artists attached to his gallery are working on a smaller scale, or on paper, to keep prices down.  Daly's biggest financial headache is his handsome property which he bought at the height of the boom.

The key difference between the auction houses and the galleries is that art is purely a commodity to the auction houses.  They are not interested in developing and nurturing the reputations of living artists.  A vibrant gallery scene is important for the continuing health of Irish art.  Without them our artists will blush unseen and many will become discouraged.  Times like these separate the dedicated from the dabbler.  Living off the fat of the good years is not a viable long-term model for the galleries.  They must  now work harder to promote their artists.  Most have upgraded their web sites to extend their reach internationally.  Searching out markets abroad and providing less expensive options for buyers are the primary strategies for survival.  It's too early to tell whether these are sustainable tactics.