Man Bites Dogs

Richard Humphreys

Has Labour councillor Richard Humphreys been bitten by a rabid dog? How else can one explain his unprovoked attacks on the Dogs Unleashed organisation. His frothing effusions can be found in the current edition of LifeTimes (South-East) and on his web site: http://richardhumphreys.blogspot.ie/

 He characterises Dogs Unleashed as a "highly organised, well-heeled minority" who generate a "loud volume of noise and misinformation", and later refers to them as "those who scream the loudest". All this about a group that is merely exercising its democratic right to canvass Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council (DLR) about proposed changes to its beach bye-laws.

This decent and responsible group are representative of a wide cross-section of society - and are far from "well-heeled" in most cases (a crime it seems in Humphreys' book). Dog lovers are in fact an amiable and democratic bunch who come from gated mansions, solid middle-class estates, and council-houses.  Far from "screaming", they presented their case in a coherent and well-argued fashion, complete with endorsements from leading vets. A fine example, I would have thought, of local democracy at work.

 The most disturbing part of Humphreys' triumphalist rant is that it fails to mention that the final decision by DLR last week represented not a complete victory for either side but a compromise. Both sides had to make concessions. Dogs Unleashed lost the battle for Seapoint (and its equally well-organised swimmers) but won the right to exercise dogs off leash on Killiney Beach.

Dogs Unleashed has over 5,000 members in DLR. A public meeting in Killiney Castle Hotel drew over 700 attendees. All of them felt strongly about the proposed new bye-laws and did what they could to change them by canvassing their local councillors. This I believe is what democracy is all about and should be applauded by our public representatives, not decried and sneered at. The Labour party is in enough trouble without alienating citizens who express views contrary to one of its councillors. His intolerance of democracy in action, and Tory Boy antics, would seem more suited to some right-wing group.

Tory Boy

On the Road - directed by Walter Salles

Salles comes with a decent pedigree having directed The Motorcycle Diaries - and this film has the same epic scenery thanks to cinematographer Eric Gautier, who worked on both. The score is also impressive, all jazz and blues with Son House, Slim Gaillard and Ella Fitzgerald to name but a few. Of course the essence of On the Road is unfilmable. It's an unstructured stream of consciousness that only occasionally yields glimpses of coherence. It's largely unreadable. Everybody had a copy in the Sixties but not many did more than dip into it. The idea of the road and the freedom it entailed, especially sexual freedom, was the attraction. The sad fates of both Kerouac (died an alcoholic back living with his mother) and Cassady (dying by a railway track after yet another party) helped puncture that myth. The book was an extended love letter from Kerouac to Cassady and the film does capture this aspect of it. It's also quite dark in places and Salles depicts much of the revelry as forced and desperate. However it ends in bathos with the tramp-like Cassady encountering the newly successful Kerouac on a New York street. This bears no relation to how things ended between them. They grew apart because Cassady was disgusted with the drink-sodden Kerouac and Kerouac in turn reckoned that Cassady had been ruined by LSD. Also, the two lead actors ere far too collegiate and glamorous looking. Cassady and Kerouac were more blue-collar than Ivy League as the photo above shows. All in all though it's mildly diverting.

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”.  

Alice Maher: Becoming at IMMA

Silly Hedge 

This exhibition is termed a mid-career retrospective. A description that seems a tad presumptuous about mortality and longevity. In fact on meeting Ms. Maher on the way in I was struck by how fragile and unwell she looked.  The lighting throughout was turned way down rendering moot the labels for each piece. Unless of course you had downloaded the iPhone flashlight app - as I had. It also caused some clumsy blundering about in the darkened warren of rooms.  I'm sure it was planned as part of the overall experience but I'm not sure it worked too well.  I also expect many social plans got disrupted as people failed to find each other in the murk.

But heigh-ho on to the work.  Alice Maher is as avant garde as we get in Ireland.  She specialises in shock and awe and is rarely less than interesting.  I've no doubt many of her pieces are based on esoteric theories from Gaston Bachelard and others but these references are lost on me. I just submerge myself in the visual abundance:  An elegant confection of snail shells, a necklace of sheep tongues, a large ball of brambles filling a cell-like room, etched ostrich eggs as precious as Fabergé, lots of hair, and a damn silly hedge that I nearly fell over. My favourite pieces were the video animations - there were three of them, two going simultaneously on opposite walls of one room - why I don't know.  Initially I tried to watch them like a tennis match but it was too much for me, so I just watched them both separately.  They were all very sexual with a lot of violence thrown in, especially decapitations.  A Freudian analyst would have had a field day.  Disturbed and disturbing - absorbing stuff.


Overall it was good fun but bring a torch and arrange to meet your date outside.

Profiles of the Artists 2: Donald Teskey

Donald Teskey  - Where the Wild Things Are

This article appeared in the Sunday Times on the 26th August 2012

Three miles west of Macroom, on the road to Inchigeelagh, you come upon an eerily arresting sight: a large body of water with numerous small islands and what appear to be the remnants of trees protruding from its depths. This is the Gearagh, and what you are seeing is the remains of the only post-glacial alluvial forest in western Europe.

The area encompasses the lost village of Annahala, and was inhabited until the flooding of the Lee Valley for the Inniscarra dam in the 1950s. Redundant roadways and entrances to houses remain — poignant reminders of a vanished community. It’s a botanist’s dream; a treasure chest of flora and fauna. During dry spells, you can find mugwort that will flavour your fish dishes and is said to promote shamanic journeying. But you don’t really need mugwort to get in touch with your spiritual side in this spooky locale. Just take a walk, or better still a kayak, and immerse yourself in the wooded labyrinth.

Which is precisely what Donald Teskey did in the spring of 2008 when he spent six weeks as a guest of the Gearagh artist residency programme. This immersion has resulted in a suite of paintings that capture the essence of the place. He has now brought these paintings back to the locale that inspired them, with an exhibition, Nature Reserve: Paintings from the Gearagh — curated by John P Quinlan of the Vangard Gallery — at the Town Hall Gallery in Macroom.

The paintings radiate an “air of intense existence”, to use Elizabeth Bowen’s phrase. The abiding feeling, despite the occasional scudding cloud, is one of stillness, of life arrested. This is in marked contrast to the violence and movement in his Atlantic paintings. He works with equal fluency in oil on canvas or acrylic on paper, bringing a quiet inevitability to his compositions. They feel right. There are glorious panoramas of trees and water as in The Lee Valley and Nature Reserve pieces. These give us a sense of the magic of the Gearagh as a whole.

In other pieces, such as The Gearagh, Wilderness I, he moves in close and we see evidence of spring in the emerging flowers. There are frequent signs of human intrusion: an abandoned car of venerable vintage, bright glimpses of houses through the trees, a white monumental gable, and a high road. And everywhere the palpable atmosphere of the place: the play of light on the water, the dark intrusions of the stumps and clumps of vegetation. “Their beauty is that of shade, of shadow, of ghost,” as Frank McGuinness has written of Teskey’s art. This is a stunningly impressive exhibition — you walk around it and breathe in the Gearagh.

Teskey is arguably the most successful visual artist in Ireland at present, certainly the most successful painter, and many would add the most talented. A modest and thoughtful man he is reluctant to discuss his prices and commercial success. We know he achieved the highest prices at the past two Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibitions, with one piece selling for €50,000 (£40,000) in 2011. He has done well abroad, shattering the myth that Irish art sells only in Ireland. Many Dublin galleries are now looking outside Ireland for markets, but Teskey has exhibited and sold in the UK and America for many years. He had his first solo show in the Clink Wharf Gallery in London in 1996 and has since had regular shows in the Art First Gallery just off Oxford Street.

Teskey is reluctant to refer to himself as an artist, preferring the more prosaic term “painter”. He likes to quote Brian Burke: “I’m only an artist some days.” This acknowledges that the magic occurs only from time to time. It certainly happened for Teskey this time. With these works from the Gearagh, it’s safe to use the more exalted title.

It’s where he always wanted to be. At the age of 12, he informed his father, a Limerick builder, that he wanted to be an artist. His parents were prescient enough to encourage this interest, buying him oils and brushes and letting him loose in the local landscape. His ancestors were Palatines — displaced German Lutherans who settled in the Castlematrix area in the early 18th century. Teskey developed his love of landscape in the environs of Bruff and Lough Gur. His father took him on fishing trips, providing ample painting opportunities for the budding artist and initiating a love affair with water. An encounter with Velasquez via the Encyclopedia Britannica added fuel to this early spark.

The child was father to the man. After going to boarding school in Wesley College, Dublin he moved to the Limerick College of Art. There he was exposed to the influence of Jack Donovan, who set many an artistic career in motion. Following graduation, he was offered a show in the Lincoln Gallery in Dublin in 1980, thanks to a recommendation from one of its artists. In this way, he escaped the traipsing around galleries that is the lot of most young artists.

These early works, pencil drawings of Dublin with a surreal twist, sold well. Significantly for Teskey, two fellow artists — Mick Cullen and Patrick Hall — bought pieces. This confirmed to him that he’d chosen the right road. A high-profile group show in America followed and Teskey was on his way. The Gearagh wasn’t his first lonely rural retreat. Not for him the costive studio, producing variations on a successful theme. He prefers to go forth and explore, to swagger the nut-strewn road. In 2006, he was invited by the prestigious Albers Foundation to be its artist-in-residence in Bethany, Connecticut — a singular acknowledgement of his status.

Surviving and thriving in remote locations seems to be a recurring feature for Teskey. The west coast of Ireland has been a rich source of inspiration. He has returned many times to Ballinglen in north Mayo to renew his relationship with the turbulent Atlantic. He has spent time in Ballinskelligs in Kerry, and on Cape Clear. Early in his career, he moved from moody enclosed urban scenes to the wildness of west-coast waves; from explorations of wooded rural Connecticut to gritty representations of the back lots of Boston. In 2003, he took on snow and rural Vermont. Each new locale is a problem to be solved, a test.

Despite his regular periods of isolation, it would be a mistake to think of Teskey as some kind of artistic anchorite, returning periodically from rural retreats to astound his urban admirers with new visions. He plays an active part in the Irish art scene, being a member of the RHA and involved with its programme board. He has been a member of Aosdana since 2006, and was chairman of the board of Graphic Studio Dublin for two years, which involved steering a storm-tossed vessel into safer waters and was far from being a sinecure. Asked why he would want to commit time to such a fraught endeavour, Teskey says that he felt duty-bound to give back to a business that had been so good to him.

The artistic courage he shows in constantly changing his milieu also manifests itself in a willingness to explore other creative avenues. He regularly operates in the collaborative world of printmaking — with both Graphic Studio Dublin and the Stoney Road Press. Many artists avoid intrusions on their artistic vision, but Teskey cheerfully embraces the dialogue with the master printer that is the essence of printmaking. He has worked with the poet Sue Hubbard, illustrating a book of her poems, and has taken the daunting challenge of illustrating a limited-edition script for Conversations in the Mountains, a radio play by John Banville, who is not shy about aesthetic judgments.

In some ways, Teskey is a disgrace to his profession. We like a touch of Van Gogh or even Caravaggio in our artists. The trajectory of his career has been smooth and uneventful. There have been no false moves, no early struggle, no creative blocks, no bitter rivalries. There’s no bohemian dress code, no drinking and whoring (although he likes a pint of Guinness), no o’erweening attitude. His appearance has a touch of Anthony Hopkins, especially around the eyes, but that’s as devilish as it gets.

His favourite tool is the plasterer’s trowel — you suspect some atavistic link with his Palatine forebears. He uses it to transfer swathes of paint onto his canvases, and as a drawing tool. This prosaic implement is an apt metaphor for the hard work that has informed his career. Teskey has used his talent well. He has a magical ability to transmute encounters with transitory nature into timeless art.

Nature Reserve: Paintings from the Gearagh is at the Town Hall Gallery, Macroom, until September 8, 2012.

John P. O’Sullivan

August 2012