Colin Davidson's Jerusalemites

Colin Davidson in His Studio 

A slightly edited version of this article appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 11 May 2014.

The genesis of Colin Davidson's new exhibition lies in a series of conversations between Davidson and the gallery owner Oliver Sears. The discussion began when Davidson sought a theme for a new exhibition - one that would incorporate the power of a unifying concept. His previous show at the gallery in 2012 featured a disparate collection of his striking headscapes. There were poets, painters, rock stars, and a few friends. These all worked well individually but Davidson wanted to do a show that embodied a vision greater than the sum of the individual paintings. Both Davidson and Sears share backgrounds blighted by sectarian conflict and it was not surprising that Israel was initially proposed as a theme by Sears. His mother was a Holocaust survivor. She was thrown from a train bound for Auschwitz and survived the war by being passed off as the daughter of the family maid. Growing up in London amidst Polish Jews traumatised by their war time experiences he admits to "a heavy and confusing legacy". For him the notion of Israel as a sanctuary for Jews is not an abstraction but a visceral reality. Davidson born in 1968, grew up in South Belfast during the Troubles and experienced there "a tangible lurking fear". His unease was frequently reinforced by the deaths of people known to him. Far from being embittered by these histories both share a passionate belief in the power of love and tolerance in healing their damaged communities.

Davidson mulled over the idea of Israel for a few days and then suggested that Jerusalem would be a less contentious theme. Israel is a divided country where many of the population don't term themselves Israeli. Jerusalem, alternatively, has a magical, mythical, and above all inclusive quality.  All creeds, Moslem, Jew, and Christian are happy to be termed Jerusalemites. Davidson is "interested in the common humanity that we all share" and felt this idea could be explored through paintings of people living there. So Jerusalem it was. They travelled to the city last January armed with a few introductions. The aim was to select 12 subjects - a number with obvious religious resonances. The guiding principle of selection was to make the subjects chosen as representative as possible of that ancient city. Many of those selected would not be comfortable in the same room, and indeed one at least threatened to pull out when learning of the identity of another sitter. The chosen 12 include a professor, the Mayor of Jerusalem, a prominent opponent of illegal settlements, two Holocaust survivors, the founder of the Israeli cinema, a renowned children's book author, a Nobel prize winner, a hotel worker, two doctors, and a Benedictine abbot. Sears handled logistics and organised the line up in a Jerusalem hotel where Davidson took photographs and did the multiple sketches on which he bases his paintings. Davidson returned to his studio in Bangor and worked his raw material up into the powerful, sombre paintings that confront you. A decision was made to identify the subjects in the show by their first names only. Those au fait with the politics of Israel may identify a few but I suspect not all of them. The backgrounds of the paintings are neutral and offer no help, the names may offer some clues as to religion, but only the apparel of the Benedictine abbot actually proclaims the man. The latter was born in Belfast around the same time as Davidson so they had plenty to talk about during the sittings. Davidson is passionate in his antipathy to divisive labels and gets "angry and frustrated with our inability to see each other as fellow human beings". 

One of the most significant moments in recent Irish history - Queen Elizabeth and Martin McGuinness shaking hands at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in June 2012 - occurred  in the presence of an earlier set of Colin Davidson's headscapes. Afterwards the monarch was introduced to the artist and brought on a guided tour of the paintings which included heads of Brian Friel, Basil Blackshaw, Michael Longley and other prominent figures from the arts. Some may wonder why Davidson hasn't tackled a sectarian conflict closer to the Irish Sea than the Red Sea. The situation at home is in fact never far from his mind. He is clearly affected by his early experiences in South Belfast and he intends to begin a project involving events "closer to home" over the next 12 months. 

There have been many twists and turns in Davidson's career as an artist and he remarks on the role that chance often plays. Taken on by the legendary Tom Caldwell directly after art college his early work consisted of landscapes and urban scenes, competent but modest in ambition. He describes it as "genre painting". He also ran a successful graphic design company for almost ten years. He had his first solo show in 1997 with Tom Caldwell and became a full-time artist in 1999. His later paintings: the Belfast series and his Window paintings (urban scenes viewed through windows) were well received and he became a successful participant in the burgeoning art market.

In 2012 his work took a new direction - a road he is still travelling with his current show. He had met Peter Wilson (Duke Special) initially about 20 years previously and on renewing their friendship more recently he decided he'd like to do a portrait of the musician. He was an admirer of the music and also intrigued by his look: the velvet clothes, the eyeliner, and the Medusa hair. He decided that he wanted to make the portrait larger than life size - befitting, perhaps, his sitter's persona. He had been working on a series of large window paintings and found a blank canvas just under four foot square that matched his ambitions. This became the start of something big in more ways than one. He exhibited the painting at the RHA annual show where it won the Ireland-US Council/Irish Arts Review Portraiture award and appeared on the cover of the Irish Arts Review. Then Peter Wilson introduced him to Glen Hansard and the resultant large-scale painting was used on the cover of Hansard's best-selling album. It was also selected for the BP Portrait Award in London. His career took a sharp upward turn. Paintings of Paul Brady, Roddy Doyle and Mark Knopfler followed as well as a who's who of the Northern Ireland arts scene including Heaney, Blackshaw, and Friel. What was initially intended as a one-off became a new phase and Davidson embarked on a series of exhibitions and commissions featuring these monumental heads. Davidson likes to get close to his subjects and speaks particularly warmly of Michael Longley, a close neighbour, and Basil Blackshaw. He painted the last portrait of Seamus Heaney before his death and it's poignant to compare that elegiac image of the fading poet with Edward Maguire's 1974 version (in the National Gallery of Ireland) of a virile, ambitious Heaney complete with Beatles hair style. The latter a painting much admired by Davidson.

Visitors to the show will be struck by the sombre and reflective expressions of the subjects. The scale of the work (127 x 117 cms) means that this impression is magnified. Davidson's Jerusalemites are posed looking slightly away from the viewer so neither we, nor the artist, seem to engage them. He has captured them in the quiet moments of reflection and reverie. Davidson entitled a recent exhibition "Between the Words". When sketching a subject he usually chats away for a while but as he progresses lets conversation die and waits for that quiet moment when the sitter looks inward, oblivious of the artist and his activities. While Davidson is also interested in the topography of the face, it's that reflective moment that is the essence these works. That moment that in different people may induce feelings of meditative calm or gnawing unease. In either case it's a uniquely human experience where beyond the noise we feel more fully the fragility and transitoriness of life. T. S. Eliot took a bleak view of this moment in Four Quartets:

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

The 12 paintings are best viewed as one exhibit and would lose some of their power if split up. One piece alone is merely a reflective individual. Together they demonstrate that these disparate individuals, professor and plongeur, Jew and Muslim, share something unique that lies beneath the spurious labels and beyond the pomp of power. Davidson is eager not to be seen as offering any easy solutions. "It's important that there's no perception of being patronising. I'm coming at it as a painter, not offering answers". But of course the answer is implicit in the work.

  

The Dublin Galleries - Strategies for Survival

Sean McSweeney and Writer (Photo:  Paddy Benson)

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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