He'll Be on the Fiddle, I'll be on the Brush

This profile appeared in an edited form in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 26 July 2015

 

Mick O'Dea, a founding member of the Independent Artists group, caused consternation amongst his fellow contrarians when he accepted the offer of membership of the RHA in 1993. "Nobody had ever elected me to anything before so I said why not." His friends were horrified: "It was the equivalent of someone taking the king's coin in their eyes or a doctrinaire Republican becoming a Free Stater." A hint there of another volte face by another man associated with East Clare. O'Dea has no qualms about his defection. He describes the current RHA "as being an amalgam of the Living Art, the Independent Artists, with a touch of the old Oireachtas" and believes it has absorbed the diversity promoted by those organisations. This seems a valid assertion when you consider the range of exhibits and styles in the recent annual shows, although traces of the old academy still linger in those leaden formal portraits and in the occasional bouts of incest where academicians paint each other. O'Dea's recent elevation to the presidency of the RHA follows 30 years of energetic engagement with the Irish art scene both as artist and teacher.

Born in Ennis, O'Dea inherited a work-ethic from his parents who from modest origins built up a business encompassing a pub, a grocery shop and a farm. An influential art teacher, Jim Hennessy, at St. Flannan's College pointed him in the direction of NCAD. He chose to avoid the more obvious choice of Limerick College of Art as he knew that being so close to home would entail pub duty at weekends. "I wanted to get as far away from Ennis as I could." Following graduation at NCAD he immediately began teaching night classes there and took part time work elsewhere including King's Hospital and St. Edmundsbury Hospital - the mental health facility. He was involved with Brian Maguire and Theresa McKenna in setting up and teaching the Art in Prison programme and for a period taught art to both the Provisionals and the INLA in Portlaoise. He also taught at Dun Laoghaire College of Art for five years. All the while O'Dea was painting and honing his talent but was biding his time. "All my work in education ensured that I wasn't dependent on the art market and could develop my voice as an artist free from commercial pressure". But he was determined not to turn into a full-time teacher by succumbing to the siren call of the pension. He was given the perfect opportunity when he was elected to Aosdana. The resultant Cnuas cut him loose and in 1999 he gave up teaching and became a full-time artist.

This has been his life since that date. It hasn't always been easy. "For me the boom time wasn't a particularly good time. My main way of surviving has been portrait commissions." This uneasy survival is reflected in the number of galleries he has been associated with. After leaving NCAD he was keen to show at the Lincoln Gallery where fellow Independent Artists gathered. However after a few group shows he wasn't offered any further encouragement and through the efforts of Charlie Brady he got his first solo show in Taylor Galleries in 1983. It was very successful: "Dr. John Cooney came in and he bought a swathe of them. I took it for granted. This is what happens." The exhibition consisted of landscapes and rural scenes including cattle. His parents had always been supportive of his career choice but this success particularly resonated with his father. "When he thought of the time and effort he had to put in getting a bullock ready for market and compared it to the money I made from a painting of one he decided there must be something in this game." But disillusion was to follow this auspicious start as subsequent shows attracted scant attention and he decided to change galleries when Taylor Galleries was slow to schedule a new show. He moved on to the Rubicon for a period and following his election to the RHA he began to show at that venue. He also found a sympathetic home at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery and has been showing with him for the past 14 years - culminating in his striking trilogy of exhibitions dealing with the aftermath of the 1916 Rising: Black and Tan, Trouble, and The Split.

One of the reasons for O'Dea's erratic relationship with commercial success may be his insistence on trying new things. Many successful artists, in Ireland and elsewhere, have a signature style so that when you buy a piece its recognisable as being by that specific artist. Everyone, for example, recognises a Felim Egan. With O'Dea it's not so easy. You might get get toy soldiers, confrontational nudes, portraits, historical tableaux, landscapes and even cardboard sculptures. "My model was always Picasso" he says in explanation of this eclectic approach. "I liked the way that after Cubism he moved on to neo-classicism." Despite O'Dea's cleaving to the academy his artistic influences are from further afield. While his work is figurative he doesn't look to Orpen or to Keating but rather to German Expressionism - especially Kokoschka, Auerbach, and Schiele. The first-named perhaps predominates as an influence but Édaín, an expressive and sexually frank series of nudes he did in 1998, is positively Schielesque. By way of contrast he has a fine portrait of Brian Friel in the National Gallery.

A recurring feature of the Irish art landscape is the bitter chorus of disaffected artists whose work has failed to make it into the annual RHA show. O'Dea is very open about the matter. "It's very difficult to get in." This year there were 2,600 works submitted and only around 14% got through. These made up around 60% of the show. The other 40% is made up of work by the academicians and selected artists. The latter group is selected by the council that oversees the annual show. One of the benefits of having selected artists is that they tend to submit larger works knowing that they will be accepted. "otherwise the show would look like a stamp collection". O'Dea sees the occasional rejection entailed by the process as being part and parcel of an artist's lot. He points to his own experience with the Royal Ulster Academy (RUA). "In 2011 I was an invited artist. In 2012 I was an adjudicator. In 2013 I won the RUA Portrait Prize. In 2014 I was rejected. In 2015 I will submit again." A lesson there for all artists.

O'Dea's no nonsense approach to art is refreshing. He brings a rural authenticity into an area where urban preciousness often thrives. His impending gig at the Kilkenny Arts Festival is an exercise in demystification. It is also an indication of someone who is comfortable in his own skin and confident in his craft. For two weeks he will attend various events (concerts, plays etc.) and set up an easel to record the performers during the shows. "I'll be an embedded reporter using drawing as a media." The day after the performance he will select a participant for a more detailed painting in the studio he has set up in James Stephens Barracks. The studio will be open to the public for one and a half hours each afternoon from 9-16 August. He has already lined up Garry Hynes and Dearbhla Molloy for these sessions. He also hopes to enlist his cousin the fiddle player Martin Hayes who's performing at the Festival. "He'll be on the fiddle and I'll be on the brush." His finished portraits and sketches will be on display in a range of venues around the city.

Seeing O'Dea looking healthy and energetic in his RHA studio it's difficulty to imagine that it's just over a year since the horrific accident that nearly killed him. A pedestrian absorbed on his mobile phone walked out in front of his bike on O'Connell Street. O'Dea slammed on his newly serviced brakes and was sent somersaulting over the handlebars. He landed on his back and ruptured his spleen. Only the proximity of the Mater Hospital and some quick thinking fellow cyclists saved his life as he had suffered a massive internal bleed. Apart from having to take care of himself a bit more (" I mind the drink and take a small daily dose of antibiotics") there are no long-term effects. "I feel that I've had another chance in life." He had no hesitation in taking on the demanding role of President less than nine months later. "I feel that it's a very worthy endeavour". He sees the RHA as "a strong, robust institution run for artists that is trying to get the best artists as members." This is not always possible. When I queried the omission of certain artists from the roster of members he responded that: "Being elected to the RHA is not just an honour like being made a member of Aosdana. Now that you've been elected you must roll up your sleeves." Participation in the activities of the RHA is "an absolute requirement." This doesn't suit certain artists. O'Dea himself set a sterling example by becoming the first Principal of the revived RHA School in 2006. He is determined to make things happen during his term in office. In addition to engaging with a younger generation of Irish entrepreneurs to help reduce the RHA's considerable loan burden, he is keen to expand the programme of events in the building in Ely Place by developing the extensive basement area. He also sees his role as someone who will raise the profile of art in Ireland where he feels it lags behind other art forms through media neglect. He bemoans the absence of a supportive figure like Mike Murphy. "Within the popular media there's a general dumbing down and an omission of the visual arts - a lot of it has to do with the presenters and their priorities. We don't have a BBC4 to counteract this. There's no visual arts on the Saturday shows." He would like to see artists like Imogen Stuart contribute to the national debate. "She has a lot to say." So has this hard-working son of County Clare whose robust stewardship at the RHA should help raise the voice of Irish art and claim back some of the territory ceded to the more aggressively marketed arts.

 

 

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Tom Climent - Season Map

This piece was published in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 5 July 2015


The Liss Ard Estate is well worth a visit if you find yourself in the Skibbereen area. The glorious gardens boast James Turrell's Sky Garden, arguably the most spectacular piece of public art in the country. This summer there's an additional reason for art lovers to call - a large and impressive exhibition by Tom Climent. He's yet another Cork artist whose work is inclined to blush unseen due to the closure in recent years of Cork's two commercial galleries - the Fenton and the Vangard. His initial momentum through a much vaunted graduate show, followed by various awards including the Victor Treacy and Tony O'Malley prizes, and a number of successful solo shows has slowed down somewhat. This exhibition should help propel him back to where he belongs in the front ranks of Irish artists. The bright and airy spaces of the beautiful Georgian building are an ideal setting for this most painterly of painters. The shapes and structures in his paintings are the stages on which his sensual colours dance. Is that a house? Is that a hexagon? They are the means to an end, and the end is all about colour. Gorge your eyes on paintings such as Groundwater and Mantle where luxuriant purples, greens and blues disport themselves around their ectoplasmic scaffolding.

Liss Ard Estate

Skibbereen

Mon-Sun: 9am-9pm

Tel: 028 40000

 

 

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Paul Seawright - The List

 

Paul Seawright goes looking for trouble and harvests haunting images from the sites where he encounters it. In the past he has brought us to locations where sectarian murders occurred in the North and to the battle-scarred landscape of Afghanistan. His current show takes us to the rust belt of the USA, those north-eastern and mid-western states where the collapse of the manufacturing industries has left vast swathes of unemployment and hopelessness.The List refers to sexual offenders and Seawright has photographed the areas where this ostracised underclass eke out an existence. The onerous restrictions placed on where they live in terms of distance from schools and other public buildings has the unintended consequence of creating clusters of such people in these areas. Amid the bleak urban scenes and boarded buildings the images frequently contain suggestive metaphors: a stray cat on the prowl, a scrap of blasted vegetation, black birds ominous behind a wire fence. These are scenes from the obverse of the American Dream. A nightmare of ugly mundanity and blighted aspiration.

Kerlin Gallery

Dublin 2

John P. O'Sullivan

 

 

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Bob and Roberta Smith at the Butler Gallery

Soap Box at the Butler Gallery

This review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 25 August 2013.Bob

Bob and Roberta Smith is one person - the English artist Patrick Brill.   This may seem a tedious affectation except that he did at one stage collaborate with his sister, who is indeed called Roberta.  So in a display of lingering filial loyalty he has retained her name, along with his own pseudonym.  Clear?

He is showing at the Butler Gallery until early October and at various other locations in Kilkenny during its arts festival.  Consciousness raising is his game and the tools of his trade are text-based paintings in vivid colours.  Ar these merely "the written hectoring slogans of any half-educated urban dweller" as one critic has stated?  Or will they change your life as the curator has intimated?  Decide for yourself.  Participation is encouraged.  Jump on the inviting soap box and make a speech. Marvel at the misspellings in the letter to the UK education minister Michael Gove.  Be affronted by the juxtaposing of Rosa Luxembourg and Julie Burchill as feminist icons.  Appreciate the respect for the wonderful Louise Bourgeois.  Bring the kids, they'll enjoy the bright and playful nature of the show

Butler Gallery
Kilkenny
Mon-Sun: 10am-5.30pm
056-7761016

John P. O'Sullivan

Photographs from a Doomed Vessel

An slightly edited version of the following piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 4 August 2013:

Doug DuBois

It's tempting to look for parallels between Father Browne's recording of life aboard the Titanic in 1912 and the exhibition Uncertain State In the Gallery of Photography.  The doomed ship and the doomed ship of state.  Both disasters generated by greed and hubris.  However the judicious Jesuit departed his vessel at Cobh while the ten photographers in this show are stuck on theirs for the duration of the voyage.

These photographers are described in the attendant blurb as "photographic artists".  Whether photography can be considered art has been a  perennial question since the new medium emerged 180 years ago.  In 2012 the National Gallery in London finally gave the upstart its due with its first major photographic exhibition Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present.  Our own RHA began admitting photography less than 10 years ago and it has since grown into a major part of the annual show - with a dedicated room to itself.

But art photography is, in the words of photographer Jeff Wall, a "photo ghetto" of niche galleries, aficionados and publications.  Photography's universal appeal is as a recording medium and the emphasis in this show is very much on showing how things are without being artful.  In fact many of the images would seem banal if we were unaware of their context.  Only Una Spain's beautifully composed images and Doug DuBois'  stage-managed studies venture fully into that ghetto.

The show is arranged around ten themes, one per artist, mainly relating to our busted economy, our human rights abuses, and the sheer misery of being poor and urban. Nine artists are named but the tenth, responsible for Asylum Archive, remains anonymous - for good reasons perhaps.

Not all the themes address the state of our nation directly.  Pete Smyth's A View from the Dearth seems more to depict the ravages of time - albeit time lived on a council estate in Tallaght.  He photographed a number of residents in 1988 and returned 21 years later to record their current appearance.  Some were gone, some were dead, but a couple of those who remained seem to have had it tough in the interim. The cheerful equanimity of 20 odd years ago had been supplanted by a wary and world-weary resignation.  There is something prurient about depicting such decline.   You feel the lash of Susan Sontag's critique of photography which, she claimed, imbued people with a "chronic voyeuristic relation" to the world around them.

Eoin O'Conaill's Reprieve and David Farrell's An Archaeology of the Present tackle ghost estates and arrested development projects. O'Conaill deals with spaces where the ground has been broken but nothing has been built.  Traces of machinery tracks, or the odd irregular mound, suggest the passing of something intrusive that has moved on.  In some cases there is just emptiness - a flat, weed-littered space has the ironic title 32 Residential Units and 18 Apartments in 2 Blocks.   Farrell's estates have been built but are deserted and devoid of infrastructure.  Hotel, Murrisk shows us the beautiful view from the window of an abandoned hotel.  One piece by Farrell, Sixmilebridge, Clare, is a striking surreal image of a model cottage on a wooden jetty.  It doesn't seem to chime with his theme but maybe I missed a metaphor.  Paddy Kelly also displays deserted spaces in Bogland but these are locations where late the Provos trained.  One picture of dank wooded clearing enveloped in mist has a particularly sinister frisson.

The Asylum Archive is a disturbing account of a problem that gets little attention in the media.  There are 35 Direct Provision hostels around the country where the State provides basic food and shelter to those who seek refugee status in Ireland.  These unfortunates are cut off from the rest of society while their claims are processed.  Their only discretionary spending is the €19.10 a week they get from the Government.  The images show a series of bleak isolated buildings - some, like Ballymullen Barracks, suggestive of concentration camps.  These photographs indicate that our talent for institutional abuse isn't quite lying fallow.

Una Spain displays two striking images enhanced by light boxes: a coil of unclaimed wedding rings - mostly similar gold bands - and two poignant pipes.  However the most fascinating part of her exhibit is the album of photographs from the disused St. Brigid's psychiatric hospital in Ballinasloe.  In addition to the various deserted cells and facilities depicted she has recorded extracts from old diaries and medical books of the period.  We are advised that "men are more prone to feeble-mindedness"  than women and that "self-abuse and any form of dissipation predispose to melancholia".  Useful to know.

It's not too often you see a Union Jack mop.  Lauren McGookin, a Belfast-based documentary photographer, takes us into the homes of the Loyalist community.  Amidst the photographs of domestic kitsch and playfulness we see the ugly clutter of an insignia filled hall. Aesthetics are not a priority in those parts.

Kim Haughton's In Plain Sight documents victims of abuse and some of the locations in which the abuse took place: a banal terraced house and a creepy country lane.  The victims themselves seem to share a kind of sad forbearance - it's hard to know if we  project this or if it's captured in the image.

Doug DuBois is an American photographer who has spent his summers in Cobh, recording teenagers on the cusp of adulthood.  Another kind of uncertain state.  His theme, My Last Day at Seventeen, depicts those lazy, hazy, crazy days before kids and jobs kick in.  The bravado that will pass.  These, along with Una Spain's, are the most artful images in the show.  Bonfire in Russell Heights shows a dark ominous cloud of smoke looming over a trio of teenage boys, turned away and unaware.

Paul Nulty's I'm Looking at Our Place is a study of disillusionment.  His mother, a long-term emigrant, returns to the Midlands from London only to find that she no longer fits in.  An ugly terrace of houses and an unhappy-looking woman standing on a pavement capture the broken dream.  The fair has moved on.

Uncertain State does not make for comfortable viewing.  The overall tone of the show is unrelentingly bleak: failed aspirations, blighted lives, dismal ends.  The tourist throngs sunning themselves outside in Temple Bar should absent themselves awhile from the  paddywhackery and come inside for a cold douche of the real Ireland.



Gallery of Photography
Dublin
tel:  01-6714654

Tues-Sat:  11am-6pm
Sun:  1-6pm

Gerard Dillon and His Friends

Gerard Dillon:  Self Portrait

The following article appeared in a slightly edited form in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 14 July:


Gerard Dillon wasn't gay, he was queer.  These terms from different eras signify a radically different attitude towards homosexuality.  To be gay is to celebrate your sexuality, to be queer is to harbour a guilty, and possibly criminal, secret. Dillon's homosexuality was evident to all who knew him but it was never something he was comfortable with, or open about.  The artist's grand-nephew, Martin Dillon, recalls that after his death he found a diary entry describing an encounter that place in the Dublin docks.  It reeked of guilt.  His sex-life was carried out furtively far from the salons and soirees of his art loving friends.   His hyper-religious mother was another good reason for extreme discretion.  It would have been anathema to her.  All this would be historical tittle-tattle if it were not for the fact that many of Dillon's paintings can be understood better when we are aware of his sexual orientation.  It may be overt in Catching Crabs and Curfew, and you don't need to be a super sleuth to get the in-joke in Cottage Gable, but elsewhere the indicators are more subtle.  His nephew believes that his homosexuality was "central to his art".  This may be an overstatement but it's certainly a factor worth bearing in mind.  The painting on the cover of the catalogue, Self Portrait with Cigarette, will be relished by all connoisseurs of camp.

Gerard Dillon's first one-man show took place in the Country Shop on Stephen's Green in 1942.  Now, just down the road from that location, Adam's is treating us to a compelling and extensive retrospective exhibition of his work.  The show will move to the Ava Gallery on Clandeboye Estate for the month of August, as part of the music festival there.  The theme of the show is art and friendship and Karen Reihill's illuminating and very well-illustrated catalogue essay (a taster for her planned book on the subject) traces Dillon's friendship with a wide range of fellow artists.  These included Mainie Jellett, Dan O'Neill, George Campbell, Arthur Campbell, and Noreen Rice.  Fine examples of the work of these friends are displayed downstairs while the Dillon show fills the upstairs room.

All of these friendships were platonic but very important to a gregarious man who never enjoyed a close long-term relationship.  However, in the case of Dan O'Neill the walls between Dillon's worlds were breached.  It's reasonable conjecture to suggest that Dillon was in love with O'Neill for much of his life. They shared the same working class background in Belfast, both worked in blue-collar jobs (Dillon as a house painter, O'Neill as an electrician) and they had the same artistic vocation. For a while they were very close.  That O'Neill with his matinee idol looks was an enthusiastic womaniser seemed not to be an issue.  However, when he married Eileen Lyle in 1948, Dillon was devastated and their relationship never fully recovered.  Over the years Dillon rebuffed numerous attempts by O'Neill to recapture their former closeness.  When O'Neill tried to visit him during his final illness, Dillon would not allow him in to the room.  O'Neill's alcoholism may also have been a factor in all this.  After his death, numerous photographs of O'Neill were found in his belongings.  These included some that had been cut painstakingly from group photographs.  In addition, he used O'Neill's likeness in many of his paintings (see The Cottage Window illustrated).  His friendship with the Campbells however was perhaps the most important and enduring of all his relationships.  He set George on his artistic way, holidayed in the West with him frequently,  and Campbell's wife Madge, while casting a cold eye on his sexual leanings, looked after his financial affairs for much of his career.

At the age of 18 Gerard Dillon left his Falls Road home in Belfast and moved to London to join his brother.  This was a flight towards freedom away from the narrow streets and narrow minds of pre-War Belfast.  Living with a strict religious mother and a weak alcoholic father cannot have been easy (although not necessarily a surefire recipe for homosexuality as James White suggests in his biography of the artist).  He joined his brother Joe who got him a room in the boarding house of the Italian family with whom he was lodging.  Dillon was introduced to the son of the family Pino Saglietti.  This was an auspicious encounter for the young house painter.  Pino, a hair stylist, was a man of culture.  He introduced him to the world of opera and of fine art, and was his guide around the manifold delights of London.   He also had an extensive collection of art books that Dillon was encouraged to explore. This was one of the key friendships in Dillon's life and it shaped his future.

A happy accident in London also pushed Dillon towards his destiny.  While painting an empty house one day he came upon an abandoned collection of oils and brushes.  He cleaned up the brushes and began to use oils for the first time.  Since childhood he had sketched and painted watercolours constantly but it was his first exposure to that medium.  Dillon returned to Ireland in 1939 for a holiday but found himself stuck in Belfast after the outbreak of the Second World War because of travel restrictions.  Moving down to Dublin he found a thriving artistic scene and became friendly with Basil Rákóczi (another homosexual artist) and the White Stag Group.  The influence of this encounter can be seen in The Dreamer which is more than similar to Rákóczi's Islander Inishmore.   It was around this time also that he met Mainie Jellett.  (the Adam's show features Two Elements, a particularly fine example of her work).  They shared an interest in Irish legend and Celtic iconography.  Dillon had visited the Boyne Valley and explored the monastic ruins at Mellifont and Monasterboice.  He was much taken by the Irish high crosses and subsequently these would appear regularly in his work.  Jellett was responsible for getting him his first show in the Country Shop.  The opening of the show coincided with the death of his mother in 1942.  A significant moment in his life.  The art world became his alma mater (in the literal sense of "nourishing mother").

Although Dillon enjoyed the company of fellow artists he was generally  independent in terms of style and technique, often to the detriment of his development as an artist.  He was largely self-taught and slow to seek guidance.  James White referred to this trait as an "obtuse refusal to learn from others"  It is often said of his style that it is naive and child-like.  Dr. Brian Kennedy, however, describes it as "faux naive", inferring that this quality was the deliberate intention of the artist.  His knowingness is demonstrated in little throwaway clues such as a Chianti bottle on an islander's dinner table, or the inclusion of tiny Mainie Jellett painting on the wall of a humble cottage.  Dillon has been quoted as saying that he wanted to paint with "a child's directness".   His independence and originality was also demonstrated on a trip to Italy with Saglietti.  When he was taken to see the great Italian masters in Florence he was not impressed.  "I only like modern art" he told his companion.

A seminal moment in Dillon's life was his first visit to the West of Ireland in 1939.  He was to return many times afterwards and spent a lot of time on Inishlacken island, off Roundstone.  One of his visits there was immortalised by James MacIntyre in his memoir Three Men on an Island.  There's an amusing story of the three (Dillon, MacIntyre and George Campbell) stranded on the island in rough weather without cigarettes and Campbell getting increasingly frantic as his addiction gnawed at him.  The West became Dillon's first great theme.  He was often accused of romanticising the West and peddling a stage Irish vision in these works.  His response to this was phlegmatic:  "Is not the West and the life lived there a great strange kind of wonder to the visitor from the redbrick city".

Dillon's life turned dark in the early Sixties and his art from that period began to reflect his increasing preoccupation with his mortality.  Three of his brothers died within the space of four years, between 1962 and 1966.  A painting from that period, The Brothers, shows three skeletons lying underground while a fourth figure, a pierrot, kneels in anguish above them.  The clown and the pierrot become fixtures in his later work and this period is particularly well represented in the Adam's show.  A pierrot is essentially a sad clown and it's a telling indicator of Dillon's state of mind in his latter years.  He was never one to explain his work, believing that the image should speak for itself.  However he had been dabbling in C. J. Jung's work and conceded that these pierrots represented his subconscious:  "They all come from the side of me that's over there".  Dr. Riann Coulter has also suggested that the pierrot's "most significant role was as a symbol of Dillon's identity as an artist and a gay man".  Whether Dillon, who studiously avoided historical influence, liked it or not, clowns and pierrots are also a staple in the history of art.  They go back to Goya and onward towards Ensor and most famously Picasso in the 20th Century.  Maybe he picked them up from the collective unconscious, stimulated by his Jungian readings.

For Dillon and the talented generation of Northern artists who were his friends, it all ended sadly and prematurely.  Dillon died first in 1971 after a stroke.  His intimations of mortality proving all too accurate - he had always said he would die at 55.  The Belfast troubles had a devastating effect on Dan O'Neill's career.  He began drinking heavily again and died tragically in the back of a Belfast taxi in 1974.  He was just 54.  And in 1979 the 62-year old George Campbell went suddenly from a brain haemorrhage.  Golden lads come to dust.

Seán McSweeney: Painter on the Shore

Seán McSweeney and author (Photo: Paddy Benson)

A slightly edited version of this article appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 7th  July.

Seán McSweeney hasn't fetched up badly for a lad born in a teeming tenement off Dorset Street. Since 1984 he has lived in the heart of Yeats country: a few miles West of Drumcliffe, near Lissadell.  In the background looms Ben Bulben while further to the south you can see the crested and mysterious Knocknarea.  The Atlantic is down the road.  It's a long way from the Georgian House in  Synnott Place where McSweeney grew up.  And yet it's also a return to his roots.   It's where his mother came from.  She once attended the National School in Ballyconnell that is now his studio.

McSweeney is approaching 80 but his enthusiasm for painting has not diminished.  He had a successful show last October in Taylor Galleries, bucking the general trend by selling 12 pieces, and is already planning a show to coincide with his 80th birthday in 2015.   "I still have a great appetite to make work" he told me on a recent visit to his studio.  "I love the shoreline and want my next exhibition to be based on sea fields and shorelines".  The only concession he'll allow relates to the size of his paintings.  He feels he has not got the strength or stamina to manipulate the larger works these days.

Don't be deceived by the mild and amiable exterior, and the low-key way he wears the mantle of artist.  McSweeney is a passionately engaged painter.  He is also the living embodiment of a tradition of Irish landscape painting that goes back to Jack Yeats and Paul Henry and was continued by Patrick Collins and Dan O'Neill.  McSweeney is unique in the intensity of his vision.  He sees the world, not in a grain of sand, but in the bog land and sea shore close to his studio in County Sligo.  He shows us, in the words of the American poet Tess Gallagher, "Not the cliche of the Celtic mists, but the sour, unpredictable, fecund brew the earth itself can be." He is the chronicler of its seasonal variations:  the frozen winter, the electric green shoots of spring, the festival of summer and the autumn riches. Those vivid splashes of colour in his paintings could be the iris, the orchid, or the ragged robin making their seasonal appearances.

McSweeney's father Patrick was twice a painter: a master painter by trade and a fine amateur artist.  He took night classes at the Metropolitan School of Art and studied under Sean Keating and Maurice McGonigal.  The artist speaks fondly of a painting of Ben Bulben that his father had painted while on holiday with his wife's family.  When McSweeney was five his father was electrocuted in an industrial accident at the ESB.  Compensation was minimal in those austere days:  his mother got £600 and the children had £100 each put into trust.   So the family of six struggled.  His mother found occasional work at the Irish Hospital's Sweepstake, alongside Patrick Collins' mother.   Her family in Sligo provided some respite in the summer months when the children were shipped off to run wild and free around Ballyconnell.  His affection for this part of Ireland is rooted in those childhood summers.

Kindled by his father's example, McSweeney's interest in art was fired at the Hugh Lane Gallery around the corner from his home.  The calm and beauty of this island of art providing a retreat from the hurly burly of life in a tenement shared with seven other families.  McSweeney recalls being particularly struck by Constable - "there was a whole wall of them".  While the imperative to earn a living overruled further education, McSweeney attended night classes at NCAD following his daily round and so began his tentative journey towards being an artist.  He has a strong belief in working at rote jobs that do not sap the creative energy required for art.  He subscribes to Schopenhauer's dictum: "do not degrade your muse to a whore".  Teaching or graphic design were eschewed, instead he found undemanding work as a disbursements clerk with Palgrave Murphy.

In his early career he worked in isolation from other artists.  He is a quiet thoughtful man, shy even.  He lacked the peer group that full time attendance at NCAD would have provided.  Nevertheless he had discovered his vocation and held his first solo show in 1958 at the now defunct  Cavendish Gallery opposite the Gate Theatre.  A seminal moment in his career was the acceptance of a painting at the annual Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1962.  This was a shop window for contemporary artists and the place where you might be spotted by one of the commercial galleries.  His work was noticed by Cecil King who recommended him to Leo Smith, proprietor of the prestigious Dawson Gallery.  His career was in progress.  Apart from the kudos of being with Ireland's leading commercial gallery, it also provided McSweeney with a peer group - the stable of artists associated with the gallery.   Most of his friends had been childhood companions whose only interest in art was the free drink associated with openings.  The waspish Smith disapproved of freeloaders and at one opening reminded McSweeney that "this is my party not yours".  An early lesson in art politics.  McSweeney recalls seeing Jack Yeats at one of the Dawson's openings but was too shy to approach the great man.  A shame as their artistic connection is palpable.

Like many artists of his generation (before Aosdana and the grants industry) McSweeney did not have it easy in the early days.  After marrying Sheila Murphy (who had to relinquish her good job at the ESB) they moved to Hollywood in County Wicklow in 1967.  There they raised a family and got by without tap water or electricity: the trips to the well and the lighting of the Tilley lamps were daily rituals.  But his reputation began to grow and following a sell out show at the Dawson Gallery he gave up the clerical work to paint full time.  In later years, when sales sagged, he found domestic painting and decorating a relaxing way to earn a living without any psychic cost.  They moved to Sligo in 1984.

McSweeney has often given the impression that his images emerge as he works the paint around, seeking the visual mot juste.  So it came as a surprise to find he uses sketch pads extensively.  He always carries one with him as he wanders his watery domain.  These notebooks contain both sketches and notes relating to colour and to the flora and fauna of his local habitat.  He notes the changing of the guard as the different flowers make their entrances and exits.  He sees these sketch pads as a spring board into a painting.  They allow him to get back out what he took in on his saunters by the sea or the bog.

McSweeney is in the tradition of romantic landscape painters.  He mentions Paul Henry as an influence but it's difficult to connect the airy idealised  world of Henry with the teeming bogscapes of McSweeney.  He shares Teskey's absorbtion with landscape and the sea but he does not follow Teskey's practice of constantly seeking out fresh locales - preferring to continue mining the bog and shoreline outside his studio for images - letting the seasons differences provide him with inspiration.  The closest to him in essence is I believe Patrick Collins, also self-taught, and from Sligo.  While they shared a tendency to use framing rectangles, the American poet Tess Gallagher saw a difference between them also.  Collins would "purposefully blur access to his scenes, as if the world had thrown away its glasses"  McSweeney on the other hand "occupies the moment after Collins, when the world is fully present, yet still inexplicable, mysterious in a clear-eyed way."  Perhaps the closest to him in his feeling for landscape is the Cork artist Maurice Desmond.  They share that pantheistic feel for nature.  It's not picture postcard beauty.  It's teeming, living, dark, and mysterious.

McSweeney seems drawn to literary folk, and they to him.  Dermot Healy is a near neighbour and they meet regularly.  He spoke affectionately of the late Michael Hartnett: "he was afraid to give up the drink in case he lost his talent".  The American poet Tess Gallagher is an admirer and has visited him in his studio regularly.  He has even attracted the attention of that most magisterial of critics Helen Vendler.  Her admiration for his work extended to a poetic and perceptive catalogue essay for a London show in 2003.  She saw in him something beyond the local:  "the seasonal pulsations of the paintings are universal".

McSweeney is passionate about his locale and intense in his desire to record its beauty.  He reflects on the many generations that passed though the classroom where he now works.  There are echoes there of young feet on floorboards and sportive voices. McSweeney recalls one lad who was "master of the shore" - knowing the spots where the lobster lurked and the time to catch them.  Like many others in the area he left to work in the factories of North Acton - his revels ending far from his native shore in the hard-drinking bars of Harlesden.  As I was leaving, we stood outside his studio looking north to Ben Bulben.  I asked was he ever tempted to emulate his father and paint it.   "I'll tackle it some day." he replied, not very convincingly.  Meanwhile he has plans for the shoreline nearby.

Sean Keating: The King Canute of Irish Art

The Tipperary Hurler by Sean Keating

An edited version of this review of Sean Keating Art, Politics, and Building the Irish Nation by Eimear O'Connor appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 12 May 2013.

Sean Keating is the King Canute of Irish art, the man who tried in vain to stem the tide of modernism.  His own art has not always aged well.  His paintings do not speak to the modern viewer like the mature works of his near contemporary Jack Yeats - whose work he described as "foolish stuff".  Brian Fallon refers to a "certain formal woodenness" in Keating and "a limited colour sense".  There is however plenty to relish in his best work.  The series of powerful and evocative paintings he did at Ardnacrusha and Poulaphuca have aged far better than his romanticised Aran peasants.  His portraits vary wildly in quality.  The one of W. T. Cosgrave with a curious top knot is particularly insipid and there's a very weak late portrait of a fey looking Michael O'Leary, lost in a sheepskin jacket.  But then there's a dashing early portrait of the IRA man Sean Moylan, and the heroic Tipperary Hurler, modelled on another IRA man Ben O'Hickey.  The book has over 200 excellent illustrations that allow you to review his highly-productive career and make up your own mind.

Listening to some old Radio Eireann broadcasts recently I was struck by how articulate Keating was, his fluent albeit dogmatic contributions occasionally punctuated with French terms (he was a fluent speaker).  It was only when he began to ride his hobby-horse about modern artists and their "outrageous vices" that you get a flavour of the zealot beneath the surface.  He deplored those who failed to follow, as he did, the "apostolic tradition".  He learned from Orpen, who learned from Henry Tonks in the Slade, who learned from a French master who was part of a tradition going back to David.  He saw the advent of modernism as breaking this chain of tradition and spent his life railing against it.  He also had a healthy contempt for preciousness about art, considering it merely a skilled trade.

O'Connor fights a rear-guard action on Keating's behalf, suggesting that his antipathy to modernism was overstated.  An anecdote related by John Turpin in an Irish Arts Review article on Keating suggests otherwise.  He recounts how Keating rebuked one of his students for reading a book on Cezanne, warning him that "you're either with us or against us".  O'Connor doesn't hide the case for the prosecution.  Two of the most egregious examples she gives were his description of Henry Moore's Reclining Figure as an "absolute effrontery to good taste", and his condemnation of Georges Rouault's Christ and the Soldier as "naive, childish and unintelligible".  In both cases his opposition to the acquisition of these modernist pieces by the Municipal Gallery of Art was overcome.  The Rouault affair caused a life-long rift with Louis le Brocquy who said that Keating should have "no rest until he cleared the painting of the insult he has helped to place upon it".

Keating loved a good feud and there's entertaining material about sniping between him and Flann O'Brien and the equally contentious Sean O'Faolain.  We also get a detailed analysis of Keating's role at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (later the National College of Art) - a relationship which was to last for nearly 50 years.  Keating was never granted permanent status there and had to struggle on occasions to keep his job.  A French team inspecting the school for the Department of Education produced a scathing report on his behaviour:  "Enthusiastic on his own side but sceptical and unjust where others are concerned, he demoralises his pupils and brings despondency to his class."  He made no attempt to teach the generality of students, focusing instead on the few who showed some talent.  O'Connor writes in detail about the animosity between George Atkinson, principal at the DMSA, and Keating.  She claims no "outward acrimony" existed after 1937.  We learn in the Notes section that Atkinson committed suicide in 1941, with no further details.  In fact he gassed himself in his office in the school.  Maurice MacGonigal, who discovered the body, maintained that Atkinson's life-long depression was activated by Keating's accusation of some financial impropriety involving the annual Art Ball. This feud deserves a monograph of its own.

Eimear O'Connor's book is far from being a definitive biography, although we do get some fresh detail on Keating's origins in Limerick.  It's a beautifully illustrated piece of research that focuses on the public persona of Keating and his chronicling of the emerging State.  She also shines a light on his roles in those entwined institutions the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and the National College of Art (NCA).  O'Connor herself makes no grand claims for her work.  In her introduction she describes the book as a "monograph".  The suggestion of academia and primary research implied by this term disarms any expectations of a warts and all picture of the man.  For no such picture emerges - he remains opaque.  His wife May is even more vaguely delineated.  It is stated that she was an active socialist and a proto-feminist but again the person remains hidden.    O'Connor recognises this problem in her introduction: "Keating was very private".  At the book launch Keating's grandson spoke of the artist's daily ritual of writing up his diaries - spending as much as a hour a day on them.  They apparently contained his opinions on people and the affairs of the day - no tortured inner life.   He spoke  of the warm domestic milieu Keating enjoyed.  There's a lovely photograph in the book of the artist with his arm around his two sons, Justin and Michael.  Maybe there are no dirty secrets.  He worked hard all day and went home to his family in the evening. The rest is silence.



:

Portraits of the Artists 5: Brian Bourke

An edited version of this profile appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 24 Feb 2013.

Brian Bourke in his studio - February 2013

There's always been something of the outsider about Brian Bourke.  He was thrown out of NCAD as part of the annual cull and later thrown out of St. Martin's College of Art for deviations from the planned programme of studies.  So he went his own way, unburdened by what was current and fashionable in the art world.  His art school expulsions encouraged him to cut out the middle man and learn directly from the great masters.  He spent his free time at the National Gallery, the Courtauld and the other richly endowed galleries and museums of London.  An encounter in the National Gallery with Antonio del Pollaiuolo's Apollo and Daphne was a seminal moment - it confirmed for him the path he would follow.  And those laurel trees took root in his imagination.  In London he also discovered the newly published Beckett and developed a taste for absurdity. This is an artist so independent that he quit the Independent Artists group because they introduced a selection policy akin to the one he despised at the RHA.  He occasionally courts this outsider image identifying himself with the exiled Sweeney, and the deluded Don Quixote. But there's nothing deluded about Bourke.  He has carved out a successful career in art and supported himself and his large family for nearly fifty years.  Nor is he showing any signs of slowing up.  His new show, opening in Taylor Galleries on 28 February, consists of 43 new paintings - all interesting some masterful.

In 1968 the Cold War was at its bitterest as Dubcek's attempt at liberalisation in Czechoslovakia was crushed ruthlessly by troops from the Warsaw Pact countries.  As war clouds gathered Bourke was going about his business in a forest studio in Bavaria not far from the Czech border.  His sombre paintings of the trees around him from that period were given a sinister edge by the inclusion of low-flying Starfighters.  These Allied fighter planes were keeping a watching brief on Germany's border and as Bourke painted they roared overhead intruding on his sylvan studies.  They were a daily reminder of the fragility of our existence at that time and an intimation of mortality as significant as the skulls he loves to include in his work.  His new show also features aeroplanes flying over woods.  These however belong to model plane enthusiasts in Belmont, County Offaly where one of his sons lives.  They provide a peaceful and playful echo of that fraught earlier period.  

Brian Bourke's first one-man show took place in the Dawson Gallery way back in 1965.  That fabled gallery was run by the late Leo Smith and his youthful assistant was John Taylor. Nearly 50 years later Bourke continues this relationship around the corner at Taylor Galleries in Kildare Street.  Bourke has seen the ebb and flow of the art market, the periods of being in fashion, and of being beyond the artistic pale.  It has been a precarious existence at times. When I spoke to him recently he described feelingly a period at the start of the Eighties when he lived "half-way up a mountain in Connemara, with no electricity or running water".  Bourke and his wife Jay (a fellow artist) had a new baby and the art market was stagnant.  Just when things were at their bleakest, the Aosdana scheme was launched.  With one bound our hero was free.  Colm O'Briain, chairman of the Arts Council at the time, was an admirer of Bourkes.  He helped the artist to surmount the hurdles that led to membership and, crucially, qualification for the Cnuas.  Bourke's career has been punctuated by such timely financial boosts.  The cottage he lives in outside Moycullen was bought over 20 years ago with the proceeds of his involvement in the Gate's Samuel Beckett festival in 1991.  The well-heeled international audience the festival attracted were quick to buy Bourke's associated work which was on display in the theatre.  A past connection with the Gate had given him this opportunity to display his wares and reap the rewards.  He spoke nostalgically of the relationship between artists and theatre folk in the old days.  He was a big admirer of James McKenna's work ("a very underrated man" he opined) in both spheres and of Deirdre O'Connell late of the Focus Theatre.  He pointed out a treasured portrait of O'Connell in a corner of the studio.  Another outsider resolutely following her star.  

Bourke is a great talker and unexpectedly a great mimic.  His stories of the old days in the Graphic Studio Dublin (GSD) are punctuated with hilarious imitations of some of James McCreery's many comic utterances.  He related an unrepeatable anecdote about Eelagh Brady (Charlie's wife) and a large handbag.  Bourke has retained an appreciation of the ladies.  There was a twinkle in his eye when he spoke of the late Mary Farrell Powers who was one of the founders of the GSD.  He painted her twice, showing her long legs to advantage in pieces that are downright erotic.  An attractive woman, many were "in lust with her" he remembered.  He also tells a story of Anne Yeats interrupting a printing session with him because she had to collect Ezra Pound from the airport and bring him to the Hibernian Hotel to meet her mother - the illustrious George, W.B.Yeats' widow.  On returning to the GSD, Anne Yeats described how Pound and her mother had sat in the lobby without a word for an hour or so and then went on their respective ways.  A scene worthy of Beckett.

Brian Bourke is both dyslexic and discalculate and it may be that these ostensible handicaps have helped to make him the artist he is today.  He is quite open about it and confesses his discalculia means an absolute dependence on Jay for managing the household finances.  Many famous artists were dyslexic, including Leonardo da Vinci, Rodin and Picasso. This is  hardly surprising since dyslexia means essentially that the right-hand side of the brain is stronger than the left. Therefore dyslexics are inclined to have more highly-developed visual skills.  In addition they often suffer in an academic environment and so turn to the practical.  He certainly has an appreciation of and enthusiasm for colour that marks him out from many of his more chromatically restrained peers.  I also got an illuminating demonstration of his practical skills.  Bourke uses his studio walls as easels for his larger works.  Our photographer asked him to pose against a couple of specific paintings which we didn't realise lacked the relevant screws for hanging on the wall.  Quick as flash he whipped out a drill, made the holes, inserted the screws and had the two large paintings in position before we could demur.

Occasionally the amiable anecdotalist gives way to pungently expressed opinions when something touches a nerve.  He has no time for alcoholic artists and is quite scathing about anyone who would glamorise that tendency:  Charlie Brady and Brendan Behan were cited.  He doesn't buy into the myth of the tortured genius damping down his fevered brain with drink.  He saw too much of it in Ireland during the Fifties and Sixties.  Another subject that gets him going is overpricing.  He has always striven to keep his prices accessible - even through the boom years.  There was an implicit rebuke here for certain artists who maintain unreasonably high prices even as the art market tumbles. 

When you consider Bourke's work across his career there is a surprising consistency between what he was doing back in the Sixties and what he is doing now.  The locales and the subjects have changed but the current show's major difference from those earlier shows is the general lightening of tone.  A painting such as Apple Tree, Ower, Autumn 2  is positively Arcadian compared to his early work.  He agrees that his palette is not as dark these days.  He worked in a lower key back then he maintains.  He likes to compare colour to keys in music, a comparison not surprising from one who wields a mean bodhran and counts Frankie Gavin amongst his friends.  All the Bourke tropes have endured however:  the preponderance of trees, the disturbed skies, the palette suffused with reds and green, the circular interludes to escape the tyranny of the rectangle (as in Small Apple Tree 1) and the painted frames. His portraits continue to be almost hieratic.  They have the stripped-down formalism of African art - examples of which abound in his County Galway cottage. They studiously avoid background detail, focusing on the sitter rather than dissipating their energy in attendant frippery.  His aim is to "avoid the Victorian".  There is also a series of exquisite minimal drawings notably Mother and Daughter 1.

There was a  hiatus in the otherwise consistent evolution of Bourke's work.  In the early 90s he was offered an apartment in New York with a view filled with the skyscrapers of Manhattan.  He painted a series of minimal, stylised and beautifully composed studies of these bleak buildings in golden and russet colours.  The show was a great success both critically and commercially.  They pointed away from Bourke's usual style and towards a more stripped down vision, not quite Mondrian yet but heading in that direction, It seemed that abstraction beckoned.  But it was a one off.  He feels now it was a response to a particular time and place - and he has never had cause or opportunity to repeat it.  He is  no enemy of abstract art, being an admirer of Charlie Tyrrell's work, but he paints in response to what he sees around him.  If he was confined to a mundane urban locale then he could perhaps escape into abstraction but in his current situation he is happy to chronicle friends, family, and especially the seasons' differences in the countryside around him.

As I was leaving Bourke's cottage I noticed an invitation from Aras an Uachtaran on the mantle-piece.  So much for my thesis of him being an outsider I thought.  This ultimate indicator of official acceptance was, however, deceptive.  Bourke and Jay have been friendly with President Higgins and his wife for many years and their friendship continues, notwithstanding Michael D's change in circumstances.  

My Heaving Bosoms Are the Bellows of Divinity

Mary Swanzy "Woman with White Bonnet"

This is my review of Patrick J. Murphy's slightly immodest autobiography - first published in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 10 February 2013 (different headline):


A Passion for Collecting
By Patrick J. Murphy

I could start off this review by stating that Murphy's memoir is the most relentless piece of self-aggrandisement since Nitezsche's Ecce Homo - and it is.  But to do so may deter people from reading a book that will be enjoyed not just by those interested in the Irish art scene, but by anyone who likes to follow the trajectory of a colourful life story.  Marvel at how a high-achieving New Ross boy grows up to be one of our leading private art collectors.

In a country where most people don't give a fart through their corduroys for contemporary art (to use Beckett's elegant phrase) Patrick J. Murphy has been a positive force in promoting the work of both local and international artists for the best part of 40 years.  Every artist and gallery in the country owes him a debt of gratitude, perhaps not directly in most cases, but indirectly through his tireless organising, promoting and evangelising.  He has been chairman of the Arts Council, on the selection committee and chairman of Rosc, and the art advisor to the OPW.  During his reign with the OPW he spread the net wide so that many relatively unknown artists were able to sell and, as importantly, achieved recognition by being displayed in public places.  He has been well acknowledged and rewarded for these achievements.  He's an Honorary Member of the RHA, an Honorary Life Member of the RDS, and Honorary Fellow of Trinity, and has an honorary doctorate from the University of Limerick.

Murphy is not a shy nor a modest man.  His highly readable romp through life and the Irish art scene is replete with anecdotes about how wonderful he is in all sorts of ways.  These include an illustrious career in business with Guinness and later the Irish Maltsters; his success in various exams where he usually topped the class or graduated with distinction; at running through forests and plantations in Kuala Lumpur ("I frequently came home first"); his expertise at turnip thinning during school holidays in County Wexford; and above all in the buying and selling of modern art.  He even recounts an incident in a rugby match where he got the better of a gouging Welsh hooker.  The book deals mainly with his beloved family and his art activities.  An early incident brings the two together when he describes how he won his wife Antoinette from the clutches of the "bohemian" artist Brian Burke.  Having been introduced one day by a mutual friend, Murphy assailed her the next day at her place of work, the customer service desk at the ESB office in Fleet Street, and the rest was history.  No faint heart either then.

There are lacunae.  The hundreds of deals he carried out form a substantial portion of the book and the repetition occasionally becomes tedious.  Especially as each deal seems more financially prescient than the last.  The few that got away are more interesting.  He let go an Orpen drawing for £20 that was was subsequently valued at €40,000.  We also get far too many descriptions of "excellent dinners with very fine wines".  These include a visit to his house by Mary McAleese where he treated our erstwhile president to "gourmet food and vintage wines without drawing attention to them".  Until now.

It's a fairly discreet book but occasionally Murphy lifts the veil.  McAleese turned down a large Barry Flanagan hare sculpture for the Aras at the very last minute because allegedly she didn't like animals in art, or perhaps because she realised that Flanagan was British.  The Aras's loss was IMMA's gain as the piece now stands tall in Kilmainham.  We also learn that Leo Smith barred Bruce Arnold from the Dawson Gallery because of rivalry over the Mainie Jellett estate.  He is mostly positive about people but does spare some bile for Dorothy Walker and James White, and has a dig at Haughey for his arrogance and John O'Donoghue for his absence of humour.  He was appalled by Haughey's dictatorial commandeering of the Cultural Relations Committee's budget in 1989 to fund his friend Louis le Brocquy's show in Japan.  O'Donoghue (well aware of his nickname) was not amused by the placing on his desk of a John Behan sculpture of a bull - it lasted less than 24 hours.  We also get some tantalising glimpses of the way senior art appointments are made and the often dysfunctional nature of the Arts Council.

When it comes to his selection of art he is in no doubt of his qualifications.  He has the eye and that's all there is to it.  He doesn't waste time on weighty analysis.  Work  is described as "charming", "magnificent", "subtle", or a "masterpiece".  His heaving bosoms are clearly the bellows of divinity.  It is however hard to quibble with the quality of the selections illustrated in the book.

He has a particular fondness for Mary Swanzy's work and he developed a close relationship with the London-based artist in the latter stages of her life.  He was also responsible for the rehabilitation of her reputation by encouraging Leo Smith to show her at the Dawson Gallery.  He was close to Paddy Collins and felt keenly that poverty-stricken artists's plight, doing what he could to help him out. Murphy is not afraid of graft.  He was a big fan of Patrick Tuohy and he compiled a detailed catalogue of over 200 works by the ill-fated artist.  A lot of his buying and selling involved the Dawson Gallery and he got on well with the owner Leo Smith.  We get glimpses of that legendary character and a feeling for his dominant position in the Sixties and Seventies.  Smith's sudden death, at Hilary Heron's funeral, was clearly a shock to him.

The only real sour note in the book is his disappointment at not being appointed to the board of the National Gallery of Ireland, despite many worthy representations on his behalf to Mary Hanafin when she was minister for Culture, Sport and Tourism.  He describes unfairly the NGI as a "plaything of greedy politicians and their financial supporters who have no interest in art or knowledge of it".

He has been very generous with his collection, donating selected pieces to various museums and educational institutions. So much so that he tells us his family are advising him to retain enough to pay his nursing home fees should he become infirm.  It's hard to imagine that this passionately engaged and energetic man will ever find himself in that plight.


Published by Hinds
408 pages
€35

John P. O'Sullivan

Portraits of the Artists 4: Basil Blackshaw

Basil Blackshaw - January 2013 (Paddy Benson)

This is my profile of Basil Blackshaw first published in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 27th January 2013:


Home is the Hunter

In rural Antrim, a few miles east of Lough Neagh, Basil Blackshaw is resting on his laurels.  His work may have slowed down to a trickle, but the esteem in which he is held continues to grow.  His reputation is set to be further enhanced by the exhibition Blackshaw at 80, currently running at the RHA.  This show features a representative selection of paintings from across his career chosen by the artist himself and Dr. Riann Coulter, curator of the F. E. McWilliam gallery in Banbridge.  In March it will move on to the Gordon Gallery in Derry as part of the UK City of Culture programme.

Blackshaw lives with his personable partner Helen Faloon in a warm and well-maintained old farmhouse off a side road near Antrim town.  His once thriving community of dogs is reduced to one, an elderly and affectionate Staffordshire Bull Terrier called Jet.  He enjoys a leisurely pipe after indulging his sweet tooth with a slice of rich coffee cake as he mulls over his memories.  He is reserved but friendly, smiling a lot and frequently bursting into laughter when recounting some amusing anecdote from his past.  Memories of the late Tom Caldwell and Markey Robinson were a particular source of humour for him. With some prompting from Helen he told a scabrous story about Markey that illustrated that artist's infamous capacity for foul language.  His response to any probing questions about his art is equivocal and often downright contradictory. In an interview with Brian McAvera in 2002 he maintained that Franz Marc had an influence on his horse paintings.  And you can surely see a connection in their use of colour.  However Marc's work seems much more controlled and not at all like Blackshaw's looser more painterly style.  When I brought it up he laughed and said there was no connection whatsoever.  Take your pick.

He is coy about influences generally but a tour of the current show will give a flavour of these.  There's his tribute to Cezanne in Cezanne's Gardener, his window paintings nod towards Rothko, his strings of horses at exercise suggest Degas, and you often see hints of Charlie Brady, especially in Studio.  Blackshaw is a master draughtsman and most of his work, especially his horse and dog paintings, are realistic depictions of these creatures.  One piece, Big Brown Dog, certainly isn't.  It's more heraldic than realistic, as Brian Fallon noted in his excellent 2012 essay.  He wasn't forthcoming when I queried this anomaly.  He's not keen on interpretation, preferring to emphasise the primary visual encounter.  One particular work, Anna on a Sofa, begs for analysis.  It features his erstwhile wife, Anna Ritchie sitting, arms folded tightly, jammed up to one side of an otherwise empty striped sofa. Again Blackshaw doesn't rise to bait - just smiling gnomically when I brought it up.  Their marriage break up was a difficult time for him.

Blackshaw may seem an amiable and easy-going character but he gets much exercised by the public airing of any work he deems inferior and he took a keen interest in the selection  for the show.  He also expressed himself as displeased that a substantial biography published a few years back by Eamonn Mallie contained pictures of work with which he had become dissatisfied.  His partner Helen chided him good-naturedly saying that it was his own fault as he was asked for his input but only took an interest when it was too late.

He's much more forthcoming on the subjects of dogs and horses.  He regrets not having more dogs these days but as he walks with the aid of a stick he cannot exercise them as before.  He trained greyhounds for about 12 years and had much success not just at local tracks but in  big races at Shelbourne Park and Harolds Cross.  He was unlucky not to win the Oaks on one occasion and spoke fondly of those days:  "Dateline was the best dog we ever had" he recalled, "she won bitch of the year that year".   Before he began to sell his art, dogs were his main source of income.  Unlike his fellow artists Bacon and Freud, Blackshaw didn't gamble.  He is too much the shrewd country boy for that foolishness I suspect.  His real affection for these creatures can be seen in the delightful A Dog and Two Men (see illustration).  Here two men chat while the dog sits close to one (Blackshaw himself) and gazes up at him adoringly.


Blackshaw's life has not just been a rural idyll surrounded by God's creatures.  It has been described by Brian Fallon as "an epic of survival".  He has fought and survived alcoholism, a painful separation, and a major studio fire (in 1985). The fire destroyed a large number of paintings and drawings (including a cherished horse painting by his father) and knocked the stuffing out of him for a period.  He particularly regretted the loss of four easels.  The fire did give him the opportunity to build a new studio without a view.  The absence of windows in this new studio, all light coming from skylights, meant he didn't get distracted by the scenery around him as before.  A further stimulus to get on with it came in the form of the model Jude Stephens. She was his muse for a whole series of nude studies which took him away from his landscapes and animals.  Her essay in Basil Blackshaw - Painter by Brian Ferran (published in 1995) is a charming evocation of an unworldly man.

Many artists move to the country and pursue their careers from idyllic locales,
with romantic views of the Atlantic perhaps, or amid the rugged grandeur of West Cork. There they live within their creative bubbles - occasionally emerging to astonish the city with their visions. Blackshaw is different - he is of the countryside as well as being in it. His horses, dogs and fighting cocks are not mere objects selected for our visual delectation.  They are the creatures of his daily round. The colourful fighting cocks were an enthusiasm for many years.  He trained them for their bloody battle and still speaks proudly of his success in this arena.  His landscapes are inspired by Dromora and the areas around his home where he enjoyed hunting and point-to-points.  In his time he has been better known to many of his neighbours as a trainer of dogs or a breeder of horses than as an artist. The practical horny-handed farmers of South Antrim would have little time in any case for a pursuit they would have deemed effete and worse, unprofitable.  Jude Stevens' essay tells a wonderful story of a trip to the "meat man" for dog food with Blackshaw. The trip culminated in a shack behind a ramshackle cottage which was was straight out  the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The floor was carpeted with congealed blood, swarms of blue bottles buzzed around her head, and in the gloom she could see carcasses of dead cattle in varying stages of dismemberment.  Blackshaw was quite at home there, chatting to the bloodied butcher, and they departed with a package of "warm meat".


Considering what a horsey country we are it's amazing that so few artists seem drawn to the subject.  True there are a few specialists, such as Peter Curling, but in terms of major figures it's hard to think of anyone other than Jack Yeats. He shares with Blackshaw a feel for the world of racing particularly.  In the current show we get horses in a variety of guises: coming a cropper in a steeplechase, exercising in strings, surreal in purple or red, or, as in Night Rider, conveying an sinister cowboy.  One giant piece,The Fall, is a virtuoso performance.  This charcoal and oil work shows a crashing fall, the horse  landing on its head as the jockey flies through the air, hands braced for impact.  The energy of the calamitous moment perfectly preserved.  You also marvel at the use of charcoal in a picture of such scale.

You can't help but feel that Blackshaw prefers animals to people.  He has famously declared that "portrait painting is a nuisance".  Looking at his portrait of Arthur Gibney in the show you can see dead hand of a commission rather than heartfelt engagement.  Many of his portraits however are alive and engaging. Two that stood out were a thoughtful Brian Friel and a warm and vivacious Mary McGrath.


Blackshaw was a precocious talent.  He was doing commissions in his teens and was accepted for art college at the age of 16.  There he enjoyed the benign influence of the wonderfully named Romeo Toogood.  He thrived there and his career took off when he had a piece acquired by the Ulster Museum when he was 20.  He was also taken up early by Tom Caldwell, an astute judge of talent and an energetic dealer.



The sturm and drang of his boozing days with the likes of Dan O'Neill and Paddy Collins are but fond memories.  Helen tells stories of rescuing Blackshaw and O'Neill from Belfast during the troubles and running the gauntlet of army road blocks with the two drunken and garrulous artists.  He has long foresworn the drink.  Himself and Helen are plainly happy and at peace in their comfortable rural retreat.  Their walls are bedecked with an eclectic collection of paintings:  amidst his own pieces are works by friends past and present, such as Charlie Brady and Neil Shawcross.  There's also a  wonderful drawing of a boar by Elizabeth Frink.  One suspects Blackshaw will do little more painting. When I enquired about looking at his studio Helen said the heating was broken and that it was a bit dismal. A cursory look confirmed this.  He has no immediate plans to set foot in it.  Maybe spring will bring some inspiration, or his old friend Jude will call around and stir him into action.   But a man who has painted for nearly 70 years is surely entitled to take life easy.  His legacy is safe.

Tremendous Turner Turnout

The National Gallery was packed out (no room in cloakroom for latecomers) last night for the launch of the annual Turner exhibition.  It wasn't the standard arty crowd that you might see at IMMA or the RHA.  This lot mainly featured clusters of over-dressed middle-aged women, hard-faced men in suits,  and a plethora of those officious biddies that administer the arts in our institutions.  I overheard a number of foreign accents so maybe the diplomatic corps were in attendance - supporting the British Ambassador who opened the event.  Hennessy sponsored the launch so we were offered various brandy cocktails on arrival, including a delicious hot brandy and cassis confection that went down well (twice).  We were forced to sing for our cocktails by enduring four  speeches before we could view the art.  Three of these were dull and worthy, but the fourth,  performed with panache by the British Ambassador Dominick Chilcot, was well turned and witty.  You can't beat that Oxbridge polish.  He mentioned that he had stood up Tessa May (his Home Secretary) to be with us - bringing  an appreciative laugh from the assembled worthies.  He also noted that Turner and Shakespeare shared a birthday.

Eventually we were allowed upstairs to view the work.  I wonder about this annual limited season for the Turners.  I suppose it gives them a spurious cachet - like creme eggs.  It's certainly wonderful PR for the National Gallery and it does focus attention on art - always a good thing in this country where most people don't give a fart through their corduroys (as Beckett maintained) for it.  And yet the works are slight and modest enough - some mere sketches for larger pieces.  Only one or two hint at the drama and power of Turner's major works.

Review of Harry Kernoff Biography

A slightly shorter version of my review (below) of Kernoff's biography appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 16th December 2012:

http://tinyurl.com/c9tmudg

Liberty Hall by Harry Kernoff

Portraits of the Artists 3: John Shinnors

This is my profile of John Shinnors first published in the Sunday Times Culture Magazine on 7 October 2012.

John Shinnors 

In October 2003 the University of Limerick unveiled Sean Scully’s monumental Wall of Light at the entrance to the university.  Senior academics from the university, local government officials, and members of the upper echelons of the Irish art scene graced the splendid occasion.  The great man himself was there, closely attended by Barbara Dawson from the Hugh Lane Gallery.  After the various speeches, certain notable guests proceeded to a grand dinner in Plassey House, the president’s domain – a handsome art-bedecked building on campus.  As Limerick’s leading artist, John Shinnors was of course invited to join this select group.  But he was having none of it.  It was time for his nightly trip to the Spotted Dog – his local in Roxborough.  While Shinnors doesn’t bite the hand that feeds him, neither does he bother to give it the occasional lick of affection.  

John Shinnors is arguably one of Ireland’s most successful artists.  All the indicators are in place:  Aosdana, the RHA annual show, the Gandon profile with laudatory essays by Brian Fallon and Aidan Dunne, the IMMA permanent collection, the Crawford collection in Cork, many important private collections, and a substantial RTE documentary: Michael Garvey’s Split Image – John Shinnors in 1997.  He has had a series of sold-out shows in Taylor Galleries over the years, oneof which involved a well-documented squabble between patrons jockeying for precedence as the truck carrying the work arrived from Limerick.  Even more significantly his work sells well at auction, unlike many of his contemporaries.  Yet Shinnors remains a maverick on the Irish art scene, someone who doesn’t quite belong. This may be partly to do with the resolutely unclubbable nature of the man – it’s difficulty to imagine him enjoying a bibulous dinner at the RHA for example.  Or maybe it’s something to do with his refusal to take his role as an artist too seriously.  He sees it as a job rather than a vocation and doesn’t engage in too much navel-gazing about the meaning of his work.  Although, ironically, the work itself with its provocative and ambiguous motifs is ripe for speculative analysis.

Shinnors is a popular and respected figure in his native city.  He frequently features in the Limerick Leader and is an active participant in the life of the city – as evidenced in a recent spat with local councillor Tom Shortt.  Comedian Pat Shortt’sbrother was not amused by Shinnors description of some public art as “moronic”.  You will find his work at the university, in the Hunt Museum and of course in the drawing rooms of the Ennis Road. Tony Ryan of GPA and Dessie O’Malley were early supporters.  A visit to the National Self-Portrait Collection in the University of Limerick provides an opportunity to see his magnificent, moodily lit, self-portrait.  The template surely for his scarecrows’ noses.  And it’s not all one-way traffic in Limerick.  He sponsors an annual art scholarship, the ShinnorsCuratorial Scholarship, at the Limerick College of Art.  He is also a well-known figure on the streets.  On a recent trip to the Limerick City Centre Post Office to enquire about the whereabouts of his historical paintings (Sarsfield and other heroic local figures) that used to hang there, I met two customers who claimed to know him well and offered suggestions as to the whereabouts of the missing paintings.

The art itself reinforces his outsider status.  It defiescategorization.  He’s certainly not an abstract painter in the Tyrrell mould, nor is he part of our standing army of landscape artists.  He has no truck with the neat “isms” used by critics.  “I’m a Shinnorist” he jokes.  You can look at his early surreal work and see the influence of Jack Donovan, or trace the lineage of his chiaroscuro to Georges de la Tour and Caravaggio, as some critics have done.  But his mature style is truly unique.  Figurative elements emerge slowly from what seem initially to be abstract compositions mainly in black and white.  (Shinnorshas famously claimed to use five different blacks.)  He’ll cheerfully talk you through the hidden elements in each piece but it’s more fun to see what you can uncover on your own.  It takes multiple viewings to fully decipher a piece.  Over the years certain tropes recur.  The ominous magpies and the free-wheeling swallows, the disturbing scarecrows, the looming lighthouses, and the looping kites.  And always the stripes: badgers and cats, railings and washing lines.  The best of his work has a dark expressive quality – haunted and mysterious.  What the critic Brian Fallon referred to as “spookiness”.  This is particularly true of his scarecrow heads with their gaping sockets. The series of these heads he completed in 2002 are one of the highlight of his career, and one of the most impressive achievements in contemporary art in this country.  Unfortunately they have disappeared into a corporate collection and have barely been viewed by the general public.  Occasionally there is a purely decorative piece, such as Cat’s Home (1999) or some of his Friesian paintings, but these are exceptions.  He’s no formulaic artist rehashing a bunch of worn-out motifs.  He is constantly breaking out in new directions, finding fresh inspiration around him.  His regular visits to DunAengus inspired a series of large paintings that captured the striking beauty of that magical place from a unique birds-eye perspective.  This was a literal work (no shadowy ambiguity),simple and powerful.

When asked about influences he paraphrases Monet: “what I see around me is my guide”.  He is inspired by those sudden visual encounters that can happen anytime and will be the catalyst for aseries of paintings.  Shinnors is keen to assert that his recurring motifs are grounded in real-life incidents – as if he is eager to dispel any fanciful interpretations of his work.  The scarecrow was first spotted in a neighbour’s haggart, the kite on a holiday in Kilkee, and the lighthouse on a day trip to Loop Head.  He encountered the migrating swallows trapped in an old keep where they were rescued, he tells us, by our brave artist and his Harris hat.  His stimulus could be a herd of Friesians, a line of black-clad waitresses, or a magpie circling St. John’s Cathedral.  Or it could be (as in his current show) a circus tent glimpsed through railings on the Roxborough Road.  

Shinnors spent 18 months at the Limerick College of Art under the loose tutelage of Jack Donovan.  He left prematurely for London – for freedom and for financial reasons.  After the London hiatus and a variety of casual jobs he returned to Limerick and began to paint.  Initially he was strongly influenced by Donovan’s style.  “That’s the way I wanted to paint”.  He submitted works to the network of small commercial galleries that proliferated in those days – Goodwin’s Gallery was a particular favourite.  These solo forays were reasonably successful and he made a modest living supplemented by some teaching hours at the alma mater he had deserted.  His big break came in 1984 when he won the GPA Emerging Artist award.  The awards ceremony was attended by John Taylor of Taylor Galleries and he was impressed enough to offer him his first Dublin show in 1987.  

His current show in Taylor Galleries (until the 27 October) is his first one-man show since 2007.  It consists of a mere seven paintings, although one of these is the enormous Hoarding and Small Circus, weighing in at a massive 69 x 114 inches.  The other six are all oils on linen measuring 11 x 11.5 inches.  The small pieces frequently focus on nocturnal encounters along of the Roxborough Road, railings and hoardings, a splash of white from a circus tent, a shadowy cat slowly emerging from darkness, tail erect.  Shinnors had been reading Jean Renoir’s biography of his father last year and he saw parallels between the influence of the Provencal sunlight on the impressionists and the influence of the artificial light on his own painting.  Hence the subtitle of the show:  Electrical Impressionism.  There are pools of various coloured lights emerging from the darkness:startling red traffic lights, orange sodium lighting, and a variety of lights from the old railway works.  The show captures his impressions of the world revealed by these lights. Surprisingly,he mentions Whistler’s work as a possible parallel.  Knowing this you see the connection immediately in a piece like Nocturne San-Giorgio and even more so in Nocturne in Gray und Gold -Chelsea Snow.  Although Shinnors’ paintings, especially Art Van Leaving (see image), are more confrontational and dramatic than Whistler’ muted work.

Having failed to track down the Shinnors paintings that used to hang in the Limerick Post Office, I eventually met up with the man himself in his studio on O’Connell Street.  I asked him what happened to the missing paintings.  He claimed that he had destroyed them and taken the stretchers for reuse.  When he was starting off as an artist he was suffering from public indifferenceand eager to get himself noticed.  He had a family to feed.  He spoke to his patron Dessie O’Malley who arranged to get hiswork into that prime location.  When I bemoaned theirdestruction, he smiled at me, “They had served their purpose”.