Review of Teethmarks on My Tongue by Eileen Battersby

 

Nijinsky and Lester Piggot

  An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 11 December 2016. I've corrected an egregious misnaming of one of the characters.

Eileen Battersby is best known for her championing of fiction from outside the Anglophone world and for the bracing honesty of her literary criticism. She has been known to ruffle some well-groomed Irish reputations. Her first novel is quite the heavyweight at almost 400 pages but despite being replete with references to literature and high art it canters along in an entertaining way. It's a classic Bildungsroman. We follow the emotional education of the narrator Helen Stockton Defoe (a resonant surname for its solitary heroine). In the character of Helen, Battersby has created a memorably monstrous prig. While her classmates were listening to Dylan and Neil Young she was listening to Bach and Schubert. She sneers at their trite music essays which are applauded enthusiastically "While my celebration of Bach's pioneering use of counterpoint ...might not have been." Following a squalid sexual encounter in Paris our brave heroine bemoans her fate: "How easily he had fooled me, the girl voted by my school as most likely to win the Nobel Prize". Her redeeming feature is her occasional expression of rueful self-knowledge: "even a prig like me couldn't miss this".

 Helen grows up in a "fine residence", complete with stables, in Richmond, Virginia. Her austere and intellectual father is a distinguished vet who breeds horses. Her mother is a shallow, social-climber who, Helen tells us,  "Father regarded as a domestic pet". Helen has little affection for either of them. She is offended by her father's "sneering smirk, his pompous voice" and by her mother's persistent slights about her appearance. She was born with different coloured eyes and her mother once informed her that: "Those eyes, they absolutely ruin your face". The story opens with the mother being shot by a spurned lover. It doesn't seem to have much impact on the impregnably self-absorbed Helen, apart from her having to suffer the tedium of the funeral and watch the female mourners flirt with her father.

 Helen runs off to Paris after two traumatic events. Her father sells Galileo, her favourite horse (not the Galileo that is the corner stone of the Coolmore stud), and Billy Bob, her Man Friday at the stables, disappears. In Paris she spends most of her time at the Louvre giving us the benefit of her wide knowledge of European art. Then, following her sexual misadventure, when she is at her lowest ebb, she meets Hector: an old, half-blind, scruffy and incontinent dog. She is immediately smitten and touchingly indicates what's at the heart of her plight - the absence of any love in her life:  "Most of all he really liked me". From then on Hector is the centre of her universe. She can't return to the USA because of quarantine restrictions so she decides to make her life in France. An unlikely encounter at Longchamp leads her to a job at Monsieur Gallay's racehorse training establishment in the Loire Valley and to her first real romantic encounter (not counting Hector).

 Ms. Battersby knows her way around a tack room and is familiar with the routines and equipment associated with riding. But she clearly knows little about the world of horse racing and the book contains a number of howlers. A race horse can be a gelding or a colt but not both at the same time. Horses have prep races or trials but not practices. A jockey that rides at Longchamp (a flat racing course) is never going to ride in the King George VI (a steeplechase) at Kempton. Also, her heroine's throwaway comment about Nijinsky is just plain wrong. She claims he was "too high strung to settle in an atmosphere as carnival-like as that of Longchamp on Arc day". Nijinsky won the Derby at Epsom - a far more carnival-like milieu. He probably lost the Arc because of a very hard race in the St. Leger not long before. But these are quibbles about detail that will just bother racing buffs like me and leave most readers unmoved.

 Helen's rural idyll continues for a while before a series of tragedies sends her off on the road again - alone and bereft. She heads for Germany in pursuit of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and with thoughts of suicide swirling through her mind. She identifies with the character in Friedrich's famous painting "Wanderer over a Sea of Fog".  She even takes a risky journey into East Germany (it's set in the mid-80s) to find the artist's grave. Her downward spiral is arrested by an event which comes as a major surprise not only to our heroine but to every reader of the book. You can make up your own mind whether it's a wonderful coup de théâtre or a ludicrous non-sequitur.

 Dalkey Archive Press
 395 pp  

 John P. O'Sullivan

 P.S. I wonder if Ms. Battersby can drive. Her heroine can handle a stick shift but has trouble with the automatic she encounters in France. It's mostly the other way around for Americans who customarily grow up with automatics. Curious.    

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RUA Annual Exhibition 2016

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine 6 November 2016

The Royal Ulster Academy's annual exhibition is usually a good opportunity to enjoy a panoramic view what's happening in the art scene north of the border and to spot some emerging talent. This year however the exhibition has a broader scope with a large number of selected artists and invited artists coming from south of the border. Conversely a number of the North's more established figures, and RUA members, are missing. Without running a fine comb through the exhibitors I notice that there's no Colin Davidson or Paul Seawright. Given the dearth of open submission shows in this country it's good to see the RUA casting its net so wide, with artists such as Karen Hendy from West Cork and Gavin Lavelle from Galway joining the many Dublin-based contributors.

There's a sombre side to the show. The  attractive and informative catalogue contains obituaries of seven members of the Academy who have died in the past 12 months. In addition to these texts, each of the deceased is remembered via two works in the exhibition. The best-known amongst them is Basil Blackshaw. He is represented by a fine portrait of his old friend the late T.P. Flanagan and by the very aptly chosen Big Brown Dog. Blackshaw was an animal lover and dog owner all his life and far preferred talking about his dogs than his art. In an interview a few years ago he was more animated about a champion greyhound he once owned than about any of his major paintings.The Irish art world is diminished by his passing.

 A feature of the exhibition is the large number of portraits, portrait busts, and generally figurative work on view. Poets and artists inspire a number of these. There's a bronze bust of a young Seamus Heaney and a ruddy and romanticised painting of Michael Longley holding a wren in one hand, some flowers in the other, and looking a tad embarrassed about it all. There's a very fine ceramic bust of Austin Clarke by Bob Sloan and nearby you can find his namesake the 1916 leader Thomas Clarke. Robert Ballagh has an austere painting of Brian O'Doherty (the erstwhile Patrick Ireland), a fellow artist who shares his interest in Irish politics. Hector McDonnell shows Neil Shawcross on a suitably red armchair amidst the contents of his studio. There's plenty of quirky and characterful portraits as well. Michael Connolly's Intern is a memorable study in gormlessness, Paul Bell's Wolf has a stolid menace, and Emily Scott's Filippa exudes character and elegance. There are so many good portraits it seems invidious not to name more. There's David McDowell's skilful pencil drawing Remember Me and Jackie Edward's burnished old man in The Heart That Asks. A few of the artists introduce a little light eroticism into the mix, these include Carol Graham's Iconic Allure of Light, and Kyle Barnes' Fixation.

 Of the many works relating to the human face or figure Francis O'Toole's One for Sorrow (above) stands out. This splendid, glowing, sinuous and troublingly ambiguous nude verily steals the show. O'Toole's meticulous painting devotes as much care and loving attention to the knots on the wooden floor as to the dimples on the subject's back.   Sculpture is very well served both in terms of quality and quantity. This seems to have been the result of a deliberate policy as most of the invited artists are well-known sculptors. As you walk into the gallery the first piece you encounter is Furrow by Eilis O'Connell, a small bronze that demonstrates those characteristic O'Connell qualities of perfect harmony and subtle suggestiveness. Further into the first gallery there's the powerful Woodquay Bull by John Behan and the playful The Visitor - a rampant bronze grasshopper by Deborah Brown that won the Mullan Gallery Award for best sculpture.The flag of abstraction is flown by Michael Warren with  Kireji, a blackened bronze slab with fissures, Stephen Deery's Deliverence, and Corban Walker with an intricate maze-like creation. Ann Butler's surreal white porcelain sewing machine and Peter Meanley's playful stoneware The Fisherman also catch the eye.

 There's plenty of paintings of the highest quality - these include The Garden Shed, an accomplished and painterly work by Clement McAleer, Breaking Wave, a fine brooding seascape by James Allen, Long Duree by Jennifer Trouton which won the Tyrone Guthrie Residency Award, Cormac O'Leary's Inisheer II, and Mick O'Dea's dramatic tour-de-force Study for the Burning of the RHA. There are two large lively works by Diarmuid Delargy and an uncharacteristically abstract piece by Neil Shawcross - the title Jazz is the clue to this freeform exercise. Our quiet woodlands are given their due by Keith Wilson with Being Here and Michael Wann's Woodland Shadow - the latter in charcoal, a medium not for the faint-hearted.

 Photography is not very well represented with less than a dozen works on show. Rory Moore's Brig Mary Jane, Westport-Baltimore 1847 is an evocation of the Great Famine. It shows a ruined and abandoned cottage against a brooding western sky. Aidan Crawley adds a further sombre note with Missing I - a study of the Somme landscape. In viewing a show with 329 exhibits it's hard to do justice to the eight video offerings which require more time to absorb than viewers usually have. Many of them can be sourced online for more leisurely perusal. Oona Doherty's Hard to be Soft featured the artist showing admirable litheness as she performed her expressive dance.

 Print does somewhat better than photography in terms of numbers. March is an accomplished lithograph by Elizabeth Magill, Margaret Mannion Kallen won the Nicholson Bass Printmaking Prize for Not a Walk in the Park, an etching and carborundum print, and Crona Gallagher produced a couple of charming copperplate etchings .

 There's plenty of fun to be had in this is an entertaining and eclectic show. You don't have to be a dog lover to enjoy Caroline Fellowes Obedience IV (a dog on a chair in a flood) which manages to be both surreal and poignant at the same time. And you'll surely smile at Stephen Johnston's photo-realist Cake in a Jar which earned him the KPMG Young Artist Award. The selection committee have done a good job in purging the show of the worthy landscapes and other stodgy fare that often dominate academy exhibitions.

 Ulster Museum
 Belfast


 John P. O'Sullivan
 November 2016

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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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Carol Hodder - Shorelines

This review first appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 14th August 2016.

The Catherine Hammond Gallery has moved from Glengarrif to the centre of Skibbereen - just down the road from the great corten steel hulk that is the West Cork Arts Centre. Its dedication to work of the highest quality continues. The inner gallery currently contains paintings by Michael Canning, Martin Gale, Stephen Lawlor, John Doherty, and Donald Teskey. The main gallery features an impressive new show by Carol Hodder - who has shown at the RHA, RUA and the RA and who won a prize last year at NOA, the UK's largest open submission exhibition. Although the title of the show is Shorelines these are not landscapes or seascapes in any conventional sense. They are inspired by the real world but they push beyond it towards abstraction resulting in work that seems more metaphysical than physical. Many, such as Evening Shoreline (above), capture that elegiac mood when the light is fading and the divisions between land, sea and sky begin to blur. The predominant darkness of the work is relieved by a positively Turneresque use of light and by dramatic splashes of rich colour, mostly yellows and reds. These powerfully atmospheric and expressive works invite contemplation rather then mere viewing.

Catherine Hammond Gallery
Skibereen
Mon-Sat: 11am-6pm
Tel: 028 51690

 

John P. O'Sullivan

 

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Review of: John Behan - The Bull of Sheriff Street

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 10 April 2016

Anyone seeking prurient details of bohemian antics a la Francis Bacon or Ted Hughes will be disappointed by this short biography of the sculptor John Behan. The discretion about his personal life is so absolute that we are not even told the name of his first wife. A footnote tells us that "the spouse of John Behan wishes not to have her name appear in this book" - a restriction that draws unnecessary attention to a banal fact. It's well known he was married to the artist Constance Short so why bother omitting it. Frazier undertook the book as a way of helping Behan deal with the death of his partner Emer McHale in 2012. He describes it as "a work of recuperation" in which Behan's friends "would get a nod to help out". So it would be churlish to chide it for being no more than it sets out to be - an entertaining tribute to the genial artist. However, along the way it succeeds in providing a fascinating insight into the politics of Irish art during a fraught and transformative period.

Although many would associate Behan with Dublin, and particularly the Project Arts Centre, he has lived in Galway since 1980. He made a lasting mark on the cultural life of the capitol in a number of ways before he moved west. The scion of a corner shop on Sheriff Street, he left school at 15 to serve a seven year apprenticeship as a metal worker. Playing with metal stirred some artistic impulse and he enrolled in night classes at NCAD in 1957. In 1960 a bronze bull of his was accepted by the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (IELA) and his career was on its way. The critic James White admired its "simple and witty conception". Subsequently he went to London and later Birmingham to work. The money he earned through working seven days a week meant that he could return to Ireland and pursue the artistic life. He never returned to structured employment. While in London he encountered the work of artists such as Henry Moore, David Smith, Elizabeth Frink and Michael Ayrton. These were influences that were to play a significant role in his evolution as an artist. He was particularly taken with the methodology of David Smith which showed him that being a metal worker was "an avant-garde advantage".

By far the most interesting aspect of the book is its account of the art politics of the 60s where the indifference of the Arts Council, and the cosy restrictiveness of the RHA and the IELA led to frustrated outsiders such Behan and Michael Kane having to find their own way of gaining the public's attention. Behan was part of a loose movement that included Kane, Brian Bourke and Charlie Cullen. They were working-class lads who felt excluded by an art establishment in general and the Arts Council in particular. That organisation was dominated by the architect Michael Scott and its director the colourful Fr. Donal O'Sullivan. The latter with his shot silk waistcoat and his personal wine cellar comes in for particular criticism. When he wasn't sharing a mistress with Graham Greene he was presiding over the Arts Council's buying policy which favoured the ethereal compositions of Louis le Brocquy and the decorative abstraction of Pat Scott (who was employed by Michael Scott at the time) rather than the rough, expressive figuration of these uncouth boys. The critic Brian Fallon described its policy as "arbitrary and exclusive to the point of cliqueishness", and excessively skewed in favour of abstract art "because it is abstract".

Behan was a prime mover in a number of initiatives to redress the perceived injustices suffered by him and his fellow outsiders. He was involved in the creation of the Project Arts Centre in 1967 and was the first artist to exhibit there - a collection of lithographs. He was also a major figure in the Independent Artists group which instigated its own annual exhibition as a reaction to the hegemony of the Protestant matrons who dominated the IELA - formidable figures such as Evie Hone, Mainie Jellet, Anne Yeats, and Norah McGuinness. One of Behan's most significant contributions to Irish art was his creation of the Dublin Art Foundry in 1970. Before this initiative Irish sculptors had to send large work to England to be cast. This often took many months as they waited in line behind Moore, Ayrton and the other big names of that era. Behan initially pitched the idea to the Arts Council but the elegant Father O'Sullivan who had "a hatred of sculpture" rejected his plans. Behan carried on anyway and raised the necessary money. His legacy is still with us today.

His engagement with the art establishment and his energy and enthusiasm for more inclusive and accessible art bore fruit in 1973 when the old establishment dominated Arts Council was disbanded and a new more democratic one was constituted with him as a member. He was able to put into practice his belief that art was for the people and not just for the few. His ascent from outsider to being a member of the new establishment was confirmed in 1978 when he was one of the first group of artists elected into Aosdána. Following the breakup of his marriage in 1980 to the coy Constance he moved to Galway - stepping back from art politics to focus on his work. Anyone interested in Irish art and our cultural history, will find much to admire in this doughty character and much to interest them in this generously illustrated and handsome book.

The Lilliput Press

Pages: 152

RRP: €25

 

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Mariah Garnett - Other an Father

An edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 11 March 2016

The Metropolitan Arts Centre (MAC) in Belfast encompasses three separate galleries and a risk-taking programme that contrasts with the more conventional Ulster Museum exhibitions. One of its current shows features Mariah Garnett an LA-based film maker often associated with LBGT themes. Garnett's previous subjects included the iconic gay porn star Peter Berlin and the transgender historical figure Catalina de Erauso. Her first solo show outside the USA looks at the circumstances that led to her Protestant father's departure from Belfast during the Troubles because of his relationship with a Catholic girl. Garnett bases her film on the now seemingly innocuous BBC interview her father did back in 1978 that got him into trouble with both communities. The exhibit consists of three films: the original BBC interview, a recreation of the interview where Garnett dresses up as her father (convincingly but for the baggy overcoat) and a transgender actor plays his Catholic girl-friend, and finally a film of Garnett interviewing her father now as they watch the old BBC film. While Freudians may have a fine old time speculating on a woman dressing up as her father and employing a transgender actor to play his girl-friend, the resultant film seems more whimsical than portent-laden.


John P. O'Sullivan

 

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Bob Dylan: NYC 1961-1964

A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times on the 14th February 2016


These are images from a time capsule. In the early Sixties Life photographer Ted Russell took an extended series of photographs of the aspiring musician with a view to doing a feature in the magazine. His editor demurred after listening to Dylan's music and the images have lain unseen for over 50 years. They show us the young Dylan at home in Greenwich Village, often with Suze Rotolo (the girl on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album), or in clubs such as Gerde's Folk City where he played his first major gig. There's plenty of domestic detail - the rumpled bed, the cheap wine bottles and the problematical art. Over the four years portrayed you see a gradual evolution from the callow and eager to the cool and self-contained - the cigarette a constant prop. These are the years of his Woody Guthrie persona - all work shirts and social awareness. This was before he went electric and became a rock star - between With God on Our Side and Like a Rolling Stone. It's a smiling amiable Dylan far from the croaking curmudgeon we encounter at his concerts these days. The associated book contains all the photographs in the show as well as an hilariously self-aggrandising foreword by Donovan.

Gallery of Photography

Dublin 1

 

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Makiko Nakamura - Journeys

This review first appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 11 October 2015.

Makiko Nakamura is a Japanese artist who moved to Dublin in 1999 to commune with the shade of Samuel Beckett. She returned to her native Kyoto last year. Her early work here inclined towards the cryptic with greys and blacks predominant. Her exemplar's influence could be seen both in the rigorous minimalism of these virtually monochromatic paintings and in their finely-honed finish. Her current show featuring 39 new works hasn't entirely abandoned this early tendency. The large painting North Temple is almost uniformly black apart from the shadow of a grid beneath the surface. It's an imposing piece imbued with a dark serenity that suggests Rothko. There are still quite a few of these moody meditations in the show but they are leavened by others that demonstrate a lighter and brighter palette. Yellows and blues abound and Les Ailes Rouges is a luxuriant red. Also, her characteristic underlying grid has been replaced in many cases by circles - producing softer cells. Her technique involves the application of layer upon layer of paint, constantly erasing and reworking so that the completed work shows traces of the stages in its creation. These are painterly palimpsests for our mediative contemplation.

Taylor Galleries

Dublin

John P. O'Sullivan

 

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Oliver Comerford - The Longest Road

 

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 13 September 2015

The title of Oliver Comerford's new show, The Longest Road, invites speculation. It could merely refer to his extensive travels during which he takes the photographs that underpin his paintings. Or it could perhaps refer to another kind of journey. A journey beginning and ending in darkness with occasional flashes of light in between. Such is the suggestiveness of these atmospheric works. Comerford selects a group of images from the thousands harvested on his road trips and uses them as the foundation for a coherent set of paintings. These are not photorealist exercises. They are more about recreating the mood of a passing instant than of capturing the minute physical details of place. They reflect the artist's experiences as seen through a car window, darkly. There's a sense of alienation and isolation in these works. It's mostly dusk, a distant glow in the sky is being overtaken by darkness. Oncoming cars approach blindingly. A smudged moon illuminates the indifferent landscape. An ominous mountain looms, a road curves into the unknown, a troubled river threatens. These are glimpses of an evanescent world. We are just passing through.

Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

Tel: 01-4759514

John P. O'Sullivan

 

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Charles Tyrrell - New Paintings

An edited version of this piece was published in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 30 August 2015.

It's fitting that the West Cork Arts Centre has honoured the memory of Jim O'Driscoll, naming its ground floor gallery after a man who was an indefatigable supporter of art in the region. It's a shame it refers to him as "James" however. He was known as "Jim" throughout the art world - and the legal world. He would have loved to have been around for the current exhibition where Charles Tyrrell, who he much admired and collected, continues his manoeuvres on aluminium. Tyrrell refers to his painting as "a dance within a structure". The metal is engraved with a grid and then scored loosely - allowing the paint to circulate sinuously. When we view Tyrrell's work we keep looking for signs of the spectacular landscapes and seascapes around his home in Allihies. An easy option he righteously avoids. He works from a studio with only a skylight - like Ulysses negotiating the Sirens. Occasionally we think we've caught him with his defences down - as in A5.15 (above). That's surely an elegiac sunset over the Atlantic framed within a dark coastline. Also, a number of the smaller pieces with their strong horizontals contain intimations of landscapes. But mostly this stern, stately, abstract work exists in a realm beyond the painted veil of mere appearance.

West Cork Arts Centre

Skibbereen

 

 

 

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John Kelly - Castlehaven to Antartica

 

An edited version of this review was published in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 16 August 2015.

When you roll into Castletownshend it's inevitable that you'll end up at Mary Anns, down the hill near the harbour. This award winning pub is presided over by Fergus O'Mahony who also runs the Warren Gallery upstairs - named after a local art patron. You can enjoy his sea-food surrounded by fine art and finish up with a tour of the current show. Your host's infectious enthusiasm for art is reflected in the rash of red dots visible.

Kelly who is feted in Melbourne and Sydney, and has a show coming up in New York, is less-well known is this country, despite living here for more ten years. While he made his name as a sculptor he has focused more on painting and print-making in recent times. He likes to get out and about. The striking series of images of Castlehaven were painted plein air from Ceim Hill and the stark studies of High and Low islands were captured from a perch in Myross Cemetery (see photo), overlooking the Atlantic. This exposure to wild and windy West Cork would have toughened him up for his recent expedition to the Antarctic where he also worked outdoors. While the bulk of the show features seascapes from around his current home, the Southern Ocean adventure features in a beautifully minimal etching of a penguin and two carborundum prints of giant icebergs.

The Warren Gallery

Castletownshend

tel: 028 36146

John P. O'Sullivan

 

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New Paintings - Michael Canning

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 9 August 2015.

Catherine Hammond continues to fly the flag for top quality contemporary Irish art in scenic Glengarrif. Her latest offering is a striking exhibition of new work by the Limerick artist Michael Canning. The show is dominated by two giant pieces Selva Oscura I and Selva Oscura II - dramatic depictions of a dark wood through which an ethereal light glows. These virtuoso works, over ten feet tall, were created on paper using acrylic, charcoal, soot, ash and pencil. They must have tested the artist's technical and logistical abilities. Elsewhere Canning continues his detailed renditions of the flora of his native county. Don't be distracted by his titles (Night in Attica etc.), these exotic looking plants are all to be found in his local hedgerows. Not that Canning's concerns are scientific. His wild flowers, set like sculptures against an evening sky, evince a mood and display an artistry beyond the merely botanical. There's a profound poignancy at their heart - a sense of beauty and of its transitory nature. Night is approaching over the darkening flatlands of County Limerick, birds wheel above, restlessly. These works when contemplated give us pause from the rattle and hum of our pragmatic, preposterous world. In the inner gallery a group show contains fine pieces by Hughie O'Donoghue, Stephen Lawlor, Donal Teskey, and Bill Crozier amongst others.

Catherine Hammond Gallery

Glengarrif

Mon-Sun 11am-6pm

tel: 027 63812

 

 

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George Campbell and the Belfast Boys

This piece was originally published in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 12 July 2015.

George Campbell has been a slightly neglected figure in Irish art. Rebuffs from establishment critics, rows with influential dealers, and snootiness about his self-taught origins all played a part. The Spanish thought enough of him to make him a Knight Commander of Spain and named a roundabout after him in Malaga. Adam's popular Summer Loan show series, now in its sixth year, provides the public with an opportunity to view little-seen seen work from Campbell and his Belfast friends Gerard Dillon, Dan O'Neill and Arthur Armstrong. The show is curated by Karen Reihill, who also wrote the illuminating and copiously illustrated catalogue essay. Campbell lived six months of the year in Spain for much of the second half of his life and the paintings reflect his dual locations with scenes from Ireland vying with his more colourful Spanish output. Contrast Bullfight with the chilly Howth Harbour. Studies of musicians abound reflecting Campbell's live-long interest in music. We also see some rare work from the Troubles featuring gas masks and riot shields. While Campbell dominates the show, there's an abundance of riches elsewhere: Connemara Dream a late Gerard Dillon, Girl from the North by Dan O'Neill and Arthur Armstrong's Little Girl with Pram. In addition to the paintings there's a host of fascinating letters and photographs of the protagonists and their circle of friends.

Adam's

Dublin 2.

 

 

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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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Peg Plunket: Memoirs of an Irish Whore by Julie Peakman

This review appeared in an edited form in the Sunday Times on the 5 July 2015.

This book has a dirty little secret. It contains not a scrap of titillation. The most radical perversion recounted involves a little mild toe play: "His unspeakable pleasure was picking, washing, and cleaning my pretty little toes." Even the brutal rape that occurs late in the book is covered by the discreet phrase "we were forced to comply with their infamous desires." This will come as a disappointment to those expecting an Irish Fanny Hill or to those who have read Peakman's previous book A History of Sexual Perversion. It's hardly Peakman's fault as she's dealing with a set of memoirs in which the writer claims "I am careful not to pen a single line that can excite a blush in the most refined cheek". Notwithstanding the dearth of dirt, this is a mildly entertaining account of the life of a charismatic and resourceful woman and of the quaint mores of a bygone era.

The book is based on the Memoirs of Mrs. Margaret Leeson written in 1798. Margaret (Peg) Plunkett was born in Delvin, County Westmeath some time around 1742 - the date is disputed by historians. Peg subsequently adopted the name Leeson from one of her early protectors. Her father Matthew Plunkett "possessed a very handsome property near Corbetstown". The memoirs were written late in her life and were an attempt both to raise money and to frighten her debtors into paying up lest they feature in her book. The original memoirs are wildly unreliable and relentlessly self-serving but they nonetheless provide a fascinating glimpse of life in 18th Century Dublin.

Peg was a high-spirited often wilful girl and her comfortable middle-class life came to an abrupt end when her father gave control of his properties to her violent and domineering older brother. After a series of savage beatings Peg decamped with a Mr. Dardis who promised to marry her - the sine qua non for sleeping with respectable girls in those days. However the sex happened but not the marriage and a disgraced Peg was ostracised by her family and headed for starvation. She decided that the solution to her problems lay in profitable compliance to men's desire. "I vowed to yield myself to the first agreeable and profitable offer that is made to me". She asks of those who might judge her: "Were you ever at the point of starvation?"

There followed a sequence of lovers and protectors who would shower her with gifts and house her in splendour. These included Thomas Caulfeild, Mr. Lawless, Mr. Leeson, and the Reverend Lambert. Keeping Peg was clearly an expensive business and she revelled in it: "Champagne is a wine I never loved but only as it was dear, and I liked to put those who treated me to as much expense as I could."

But Peg was torn between her desire for security and her adventurous spirit and was forever spiting the hand that fed her. She produced nine children by various lovers but they get scant mention and most appear to have died prematurely - one from shock after an assault on her house and another from an "inward complaint." Lawless was perhaps the great love of her life and when he fled to America to escape his debts, Peg's heart hardened and she decided to make a business out of what initially had been a way of ensuring a comfortable passage through life. "In short I was to become a compleat Coquet." Later on she leased a house on Drogheda Street with her friend Sally Hayes and it soon became the place of low resort for fashionable Dublin. Peg suffered no shame about her business. She regularly took her entourage of trollops to the theatre as a way of advertising their charms.

It seems men went a whoring as a matter of routine in those days. Her admirers included the Duke of Rutland, who was Lord Lieutenant at the time. He parked a troop of armed and mounted soldiers outside while her house while he and his friends indulged in a 16-hour revel. The Duke's notorious appetite for claret eventually caught up on him and this heroic bon viveur died from liver disease in his Phoenix Park Lodge at the age of 33.

Peg alas also came to a rather sticky end. While returning home one night she and a companion were set upon by a gang of ruffians and were robbed and raped. This assault resulted in a serious venereal infection, probably syphilis, and she died in abject poverty not long after. An attempt at a cure using mercury probably hastened her demise. She was working on her memoirs right to the very end and the last entry reads poignantly: "good heavens my fingers refuse to do their office".

The sub-title of the book, Memoirs of an Irish Whore is misleading. These are not the first person memoirs of Peg but rather a very loose biography written in the third person. It's still an interesting story but it lacks the true voice of this extraordinary woman. It's a kind of Peg for Dummies. The best bits are the occasional extracts from the original memoirs. Also, Irish readers may find the potted Irish history a bit tedious. If you want to encounter the authentic voice of Peg you will be better served by the 1995 Lilliput Press version of the memoirs edited by Mary Lyons. Or better still visit the manuscripts room of the NLI and experience the real thing.

Quercus

240 pp

€?

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Don Cronin - Oblique Revisions

A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 28 June 2015.


Don Cronin's public sculpture is probably familiar to anyone who travels regularly around the southern half of the country. There's his personable bull on the way into Macroom, Billy the Blacksmith outside Innishannon, and Gyrators, an abstract piece near Midleton - to name but a few. However, to catch this artist at his best you need to view his gallery work - free from the compromises often involved in public commissions. It's surprising that he's had to wait so long for his first solo show in Dublin and the Artistic Alliance is to be commended for bringing him to Bonham's. His immaculately finished abstract pieces hint at Constructivism and its disciples such as David Smith and the influential Tipperary-born sculptor John Burke. But Cronin occasionally adds a twist to the smooth amalgam of geometries that is Constructivism by inserting a slightly contrary organic note in the midst of the machined perfection. His materials include bronze, stainless steel, and aluminium. There's also a problematical experiment in polyester resin. But overall the show demonstrates an accomplished artist at the height of his creative powers. Two pieces stand out, After Bonneville in stainless steel and Stack (above) in aluminium. This work has the drama and radiance of fully realised art.

John P. O'Sullivan

 

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Not the Same Sky by Evelyn Conlon

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 14 June 2015.


Did the Earl Grey Female Orphan Emigration Scheme of 1848 deposit hordes of marauding Irish trollops on the streets of Australian cities as nationalist newspapers and government reports of the time suggest? Or did a benign and orderly group of Irish girls settle into their new life of service, marriage and child-bearing with barely a disruptive ripple, as Evelyn Conlon infers in her novel about this little-known episode in Irish history.

The book is a fictionalised account of events arising from the Earl Grey scheme which transported young Irish female orphans from workhouses around the country to Australia to alleviate the eight to one male to female disparity there. The British authorities would thus ease the overcrowding in its Famine filled institutions and at the same time provide breeding stock and servant girls for its young colony. The novel centres on the lengthy journey of these hapless girls to Australia on the Thomas Arbuthnot and their subsequent lives in Australia.

Those familiar with Robert Hughes classic The Fatal Shore may be expecting the worst on the voyage but the most eventful thing that happens is one of the younger girls has her first period to the consternation of her and her companions. There was also some sea sickness. But these were minor events on this transoceanic idyll where the girls enjoyed classes every day and occasional dancing on deck. They expressed their gratitude by making a quilt for the Surgeon-Superintendent. There's talk of "substantial pies" and at the end of the voyage the Surgeon-Superintendent proudly notes of his charges that "They are fatter now." How could such a Edenic state prevail on a four-month voyage in a ship crammed with nubile girls and lusty sailors? Only perhaps in a novel aimed at those who prefer bland escapism to brute reality.



A lot of the inaction is viewed through the eyes of the ship's Surgeon-Superintendent Charles Strutt - an historical figure. One of Conlon's source documents was Strutt's diary of the voyage and his subsequent encounters with the girls over the years. He was a kind and thoughtful man and practised the Victorian virtues by ensuring that his charges received decent sanitary facilities, rudimentary education and even the occasional diversion through dances.

Although focusing on the lives of four of the girls, the only character that really comes alive is Strutt, thanks perhaps to the material gleaned from his diaries. We get a detailed account of his courtship and marriage and are told of his "wistful libido". One of the girls, Julia, is a free spirit who escapes the system and makes her own way. She doesn't discount prostitution: "There was always one thing she could do if she ever became hungry" but there's no indication that she took that route. Eventually she becomes a dancer and meets Lola Montez on her travels.

And herein lies the worm at the heart of this confection. Unlettered orphans do not keep diaries and so we have no knowledge of the interior lives of these girls. A Victorian gentleman's perspective is the dominant one and Conlon's imagination does not adequately fill the gap. The descriptions of life after the voyage are superficial and her very brief attempts to get inside their heads in the form of diaries discovered for Honora and Julia seem like afterthoughts. Honora quoting Aeschylus seems downright unlikely. Conlon has spent time in Australia and there are dabs of local colour (she knows her lorikeets) but these do not make a convincing recreation of the kind of lives these unfortunate women must have lived. We hear only one indirect account of any violence - where it's reported that an Eliza Horgan was struck by her master: "Her master!. Molly shrieked. Don't be silly. Why would a master hit you?"

Nor does the quality of the prose compensate for the pallid escapism of the content. The term shtum has no place outside an episode of Only Fools and Horses and the flat and anachronistic nature of the writing fails to engender any period atmosphere. And what can this phrase mean: "Honora knocked him off his heart with her look"?

Back in the real world the story did not have a happy ending. "Hordes of useless trollops, thrust upon an unwilling community" screamed the Melbourne Argus. A more measured report to the Children's Apprenticeship Board claimed that in Adelaide in 1849 "there are 21 of the Irish Orphans upon the Streets". This led to protests against the "dregs" of the Irish workhouses being dumped on Australian society. As complaints grew more vocal, and as the famine in Ireland appeared to have abated, the British Government agreed to the scheme being terminated.

Wakefield Press

251 pp

€11.99

 

 

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Tennessee Williams Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr

 

I do relish a good meaty literary biography and John Lahr's recent magnum opus on Tennessee Williams is one of the best. Its 600 pages must be the definitive word on that troubled genius. He had a lot going for him, brutal father, puritanical mother, fragile sister and his own guilty sexuality. It all came out in the plays which must be amongst the most autobiographical in the history off the theatre. Lahr has an excellent eye for spotting the connections between the life and the work. He's also very good on the politics of the New York theatre and on Williams' creative relationship with Elia Kazan - his most successful director. Its replete with juicy anecdotes about the actors, agents, hustlers, and chancers that surrounded him. Brando is there fighting off the lustful assaults of Anna Magnani, and we are spared no details of Williams relentless consumption of drink, drugs and young men. Williams went out of fashion long before he died and Lahr traces this extended dying fall mercilessly. He messed with his will a lot as those around him fell out of favour and this ultimately caused problems for his literary estate. It's very well illustrated with some photographs that do its subject no favours. And did you know that the biographer John Lahr is married to Connie Booth - the fair Polly from Fawlty Towers. No, I didn't either. If you like literary biography and are interested in the theatre you'll love this. If you don't care for either, you'll still enjoy the story - the rise and fall of a fascinating, talented but unlikeable man.


 

 

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Conor Foy - Fight or Flight

 

A slightly edited (different last sentence) version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 31 May 2015.

Fight or Flight is the title of Conor Foy's new show and many of these quietly disturbing pieces are suggestive of violence just past, or pending. Foy's work is based on images from the news media or from camera phone footage. He harvests elements from these online sources to create his subtle and resonant paintings. The artist, an NCAD graduate based in New York says: "In these pieces, painting's stillness is used as a meditative counterpoint to the rapid fire of news media." A number of the paintings such as Down 3 feature what look like dead bodies and others contain kneeling figures who seem to be awaiting or undergoing punishment. The titles such as Stick, Down and Guidance are cryptically suggestive. While the overall sense is that there's not much good news here, we do have plenty of room to speculate as to the exact nature of the bad news. Guidance 3 looks like the prelude to a beheading, but maybe it's just going to be a beating. Three of the pieces are entitled Muybridge after Eadweard Muybridge famous for his photographic studies of animals and men in motion. The ambiguous Baconesque images in these paintings are both a homage to that artist and an acknowledgement of his debt to the pioneering photographer.

Molesworth Gallery

Dublin 2.

John P. O'Sullivan


 

 

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Paul Muldoon at Liberty Hall

Paul Muldoon arrives in our midst festooned with titles and awards - Pulizer Prize winner, Professor of Poetry at Princeton, and Poetry editor on the New Yorker amongst tthem. He's the nearest poetry has to a rock star so I was was a little surprised that the venue was only half full. I'm not sure the event was well publicised - a number of people I spoke to subsequently were pissed off that they hadn't heard it was on. He was introduced by the General Secretary of the INTO - confirming perhaps that notion that poetry was something you did at school. He's not looking very well - a bit pale and dishevelled and although he's dressed in black there's no hiding that substantial paunch. His greying hair has lost that Phil Spector look and is now just artily tousled. He apologises for his regular sniffling which he attributes to a rapeseed allergy.

He's a practised and proficient performer - starting with the old lecturer's touch of taking off his watch and laying it on the podium so he can discreetly monitor the time. He's at home on the stage and moves around easily, interjecting little quips both between and even within the poems. At one stage he comments that a particular poem "goes on a bit". He speaks slowly in a mellifluous Northern accent and pauses regularly for dramatic effect. His poetry is witty, worldly and intelligent. He likes repetition, no surprise in someone who dabbles in rock music. I particularly enjoyed The Old Country, Muldoon's catechism of cliches:

Every slope was a slippery slope

where every shave was a very close shave

and money was money for old rope

where every grave was a watery grave

His latest collection (One Thousand Things Worth Knowing) contains a fine tribute to Seamus Heaney - Cuthbert and the Otters - but he chose to omit that and gave us Cuba (2) from the same book ("I'm hanging with my daughter") which seems to me a strained and inferior poem. But that's a mere quibble. All in all it was an entertaining performance from a polished and urbane poet.

He gives us a bare hour and is definitely not up for an encore. There's books to be signed. His signature is a minimal scrawl and he doesn't really engage with anyone - moving the queue along briskly. I ask him why his eyes are closed in his recent RA portrait painted by Colin Davidson - very unusual for Colin's work which tend to focus on the eyes. He pauses slightly and then replies that "you'll have to ask Colin". The line must keep moving I suppose. These signings are ghastly affairs with eager punters colliding with jaded writers and I feel sorry for all concerned. Nonetheless the impression I got was of a professional operator, conscious of his status, going through the dutiful motions. Or he could of course just be badly jet-lagged and we got him on an off day. Whatever - the poetry forgives all.

 

 

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