Symposium- GENRE PAINTING

All Welcome to the upcoming Symposium on Genre Painting in the Sybil Connolly Lecture Theatre at NCAD next Friday 19th January at 11 am.

Jane Rainey – MFA Graduate, 2016

Jane Rainey, Toxicity, oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm, 2016

 

The paintings often describe no specific events, with the beginning, the end and the transgressive or progressive middle, often folding in on each other. The works are always in a state of flux, living somewhere in-between representation and abstraction, depicting things that are of this world but also not of this world. Tangible things that you can almost touch collide with unrecognisable abstract marks that are very much involved and about the act of painting. The worlds are suspended in time, with no sense of gravity, living within a liminal space that is neither here nor there. Bright in colour the works pulsate against each other causing harmonious connections as well as uneasy clashes. A sense of overwhelming uneasy and awkwardness occupy the painting, alluding that all is not what it seems.

Jane Rainey, In Response to the infinite Scream of Nature,oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm. 2016

Jane Rainey, Witches Broom,oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm, 2016

Jane Rainey,The Man behind the Curtain, oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm,2016

Jane Rainey website

Joseph Heffernan – MFA Graduate, 2016

Joseph Heffernan, Cityscape, oil on panel, 40 x 30 cm, 2016

The Paintings are about the day-to-day activities of being in the studio and the Quixotic nature of the working process. The characters in the paintings are ones that I chose to bring in to the studio for narrative reasons. This narrative involves a theatrical conflict between abstraction and figuration, play-fullness and melancholy, hopefulness and despair, and is used as a vehicle or stage for exploring the absurdity of things.        Joseph Heffernan

Joseph Heffernan, Flume, oil on panel, 25 x 20 cm, 2016

Joseph Heffernan, Crusade, oil on panel, 30 x 40 cm, 2016

Joseph Heffernan, The Comedian, oil on panel, 25 x 15 cm, 2016

Joseph Heffernan, The Rehearsal, oil on panel, 90 x 70 cm 2016

Helen O’Leary in conversation with Diana Copperwhite

Helen O’Leary, Quarantine 2, 2015, 7′ x 12′

Diana Copperwhite   Could you talk a little about the day-to-day process of working in the studio?

Helen O’Leary   I work every day and prefer like most artists long days unpunctuated by anything else. I keep distractions to the bare minimum; the dog, coffee, and the radio are all the visitors I need. I start by tidying, putting things in an order of sorts, moving things around, picking at things. I try to do the real finicky stuff as early as possible when I’m alert; the physical building takes a lot of focus. Getting ready to paint takes time, I use pigments, eggs, grounds, so there is a lot of prep work. I start most days with a healthy unravelling and dismantling of things I’m not happy with, and try to put a bit of order on the studio. At night as I finish, I like to make a list as I leave of things I will get to in the morning, or to finish with a job that needs drying time. I use egg tempera, so it takes a lot of layers to get the right colour. I have a live work space, which is how I prefer it to be as I’m always leaving things to ‘settle’ or dry and I can go out to the studio at all hours of the night to switch off a pot of glue, or put another layer of ground on. I don’t like a division between my domestic life and that of the studio.

Helen O’Leary, Quarantine detail, 7′ x 12′, wood, egg oil emulsion. 2015

DC    You talk about your cultural roots and what it was like for you growing up, so is there a link between that and your current practice?

HO’L  The economy of little turned into a lot in my early life has influenced me; leisure was squashed into work so trying to find fun in work was a normal thing. I think about the rhythm of working the farm as a child and the delight that was found in labour and its avoidance, play seemed stolen or squashed in. There was an innocence and curiosity in the physical world of the world of the farm that I find again and again in the studio. It was a time with little use for sentimentality, where pragmatism and lyricism was hand in hand. I try to keep that alive in the studio and life.

The objects that surrounded me as a child told the story of people who farmed the land where I grew up, we had no photos of them but instead we had a wealth of objects that held our history, carved granite feeding troughs, floors that with packed with cobbled stones in geometric patterns, a straight line of a lane was cut through the fields to the new road by my father with a shovel, stones piled into uneasy but sturdy fences, and more suspect objects such as a holy well, and a devils track in the bottom of the strand field. The farm held our place in the world, past and present in much the same way as my studio holds mine now. My father made boats, lobster pots and nets when he wasnt down the land after cattle. Days were long and divided into different kind of work. Bits of trees and timber were bent into boats at the side of the house. We always had a bolt of canvas on the feed loft, and each spring we would watch his sails in the regatta as tiny triangles on the horizon line. There was always a job on the go, things ready to do, and it gave me a real sense of materiality.

Helen O’Leary, Quarantine, detail, 2015

It was I suppose pre -industrial, and it ended abruptly with a collision of events over a couple of years. A tornado, rare enough in Wexford, hit the farm, two years later the new television antenna got hit by lightening and the thatch caught fire. The fire brigade was called and turned the hoses on it. It was a mud house and it pretty much washed away in front of us. (As a child I imagined Tarzan burnt our house down). And a couple of years later my father died. We were suddenly and with little warning or warmth in a cold new world of modernity.

Helen O’Leary, Delicate negotiations geometry group

DC    How do you relate that to the painting world now?

HO’L I’m very aware of the collision between the old and new, destruction and rebuilding are very much a part of my practice. I think of how people construct lives and I construct paintings with awareness of the failures and foibles that are part and parcel of being alive. Painting is a language, we push it forward to keep it going, but I’m always aware of its history as I work. The farm was littered with functional objects with great familial meaning. I think of that a lot, of things that have a function but the meaning has been skewed or changed.

Helen O’Leary, Delicate negotiations, blue, (back view)

A well-meaning tourist once sent us Frisbees from America; I remember the excitement of opening the parcel as if it were yesterday. We thought they has sent us a set of highly coloured neon plastic lids, a little useless but we ended up feeding the cats out of them in the cow house. I still remember the laughter and embarrassment when another tourist picked them up and showed us how to use them. I like that slippage of meaning, from one generation or culture to another, and it’s something I now welcome in the studio.

I learned defiance and gentleness from my mother, I remember sitting in a feminist studies class in Chicago Art Institute, and realized that I had learned it all first hand while keeping the farm afloat with her and my sisters as a child.

Helen O’Leary, Efficiency of love 2014-15, egg, oil on constructed wood, 66″ X 54″

Helen O’Leary, Delicate negotiations, 2014-15, egg, oil on constructed wood, sizes vary

DC    What are your influences in the broad sense of the word?

HO’L   I’m interested in thwarted gestures, of how people speak despite being silenced – of reused and re purposed language. Resilience, defiance and fortitude seemed even more important to me as I head into the uncharted territory of middle age. A few years ago I spent a while in Paris and found myself triangulating between Brancusi’s studio outside of the Pompidou, Raft of the Medusa in the Louvre, and the Museum of War. I had a well-worn path worn to all three by the time I left. The Museum of War was and still is a real favourite, especially the armour section and its collection of ‘failed’ armour, with cannon ball holes in the chest. Painting is a language that is well able to take a few hits, and can gather itself up stronger and taller, and keeps on speaking.

Helen O’Leary, Geometry of home

DC  Is subversion of closure important for the work?

HO’L    I need the work to make me laugh while I’m making it. Keeping things on a wobble, never settling completely is important to me. My earlier work was a series of large ‘abstract’ paintings in the 80’s, which was a collection of offs and ends from the studio floor. These paintings took on the appearance of abstract paintings; I was interested in earnest paintings of their kind, tired third generation abstract expressionist paintings, but I wanted to make paintings through the trials and errors of making. I thought about them as making do with the left over small efforts, compared to the certainty present in the language of other kinds of painting.

In recent work, the same preoccupation is present; I nod to minimalism and to the language of modernism while accumulating the odds and ends of my attempts to speak. I’m thinking of a more catholic sort of minimalism though.

I also think of the multiple ways of using or seeing an object, of re-doing something that already exists in another form in the language of painting. I gather up everything; nothing is ever wasted. I collect the ends of the sticks or paint, or jars, and they in turn become the next accumulated gesture.

Helen O’Leary, Delicate negotiations, portrait, 2014-15. egg, oil on constructed wood. 65″ x 54″

DC   Do you think there’s been a shift in your process recently?

What’s next for you? You are the inaugural recipient of the Joan Mitchell Artist-in-Residency Award amongst other things!

HO’L    I’m expanding the materiality of the work, and using wood and lots of joinery, I’ve put metal aside for now until my arm recovers. I’m really trying to explore surface, egg, encaustic, fresco, silver point; it’s all up for grabs. I’m also looking for even more compactness and frugality in the finished piece. I’m always on the lookout for old techniques of painting, and new things to fold into painting.

I will be at the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans in November, I’m really looking forward to it, Joan Mitchell was a big influence on me as a young painter, and it is a real honour to be invited to the residency. The studios are amazing; it will be good to see the work out of my jammed Bushwick studio.

In December I have a booth at Pulse Miami with Lesley Heller.

My show at the MAC Belfast opens in February, its a great space, I can’t wait to spread out there. I am in the process of making one of the biggest paintings that I have done to date. I want to make a painting that is self-supportive, and can fall in on itself. I’m building it in bits that will hopefully all lock together.

I have a show at Fenderesky, Belfast sometime in the late spring, and then a rest.

Helen O’Leary, Refusal, 2010-13, wood, metal, ceramic, gold, linen, detail from 30″ x 12″

Helen O’Leary is currently a Professor of Art at Penn State University. Recently she has been a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her show Delicate Negotiations has just closed at the Leslie Heller Workspace, 54 Orchard Street, New York.

Diana Copperwhite is an artist living in Dublin and is on the lecturing staff in the Painting Department, NCAD.

The conversation took place in New York, summer 2015. Photographs by Eva O’Leary

Stranger Shores

Article by Michael Hill:

Stranger Shores is an exhibition taking place at the Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast, from May 21 to June 26, 2015. Curated by Peter Burns, it includes a total of thirty-nine paintings by John Albert Duigenan, Aileen Murphy, Sheila Rennick, and Burns himself. The many paintings, in a range of sizes and variety of media, depict myriad peculiar people, plants, visions, and environments in an extraordinary and vivid manner. Even the more commonplace characters seem to find themselves in compromising or stimulating scenarios. Despite the encyclopaedic diversity of the works in this exhibition, the four artists share a great sensitivity towards their subject matter and a most direct approach to confronting it. Some further observations are offered below:

Ancient Times, Oil on Canvas, Peter Burns

“The colossal eye of a prehistoric lizard takes in a barren volcanic landscape during Ancient Times. His tongue flicks through the sulfuric air to the edge of the canvas. A tiny and unlikely hero reaches to pierce the beast’s throat with his lance – or perhaps it is a reluctant painter reaching with a giant brush to complete his menacing creation. In the background of the scene, lava and semen erupt violently towards a suspended vulva in an urgent race to propagate life in this primordial dawn.

Flower, Acrylic on Canvas, John Albert Duigenan

A curtain of canvas is drawn back and hooked over the top of the stretcher, revealing a tottering monstrosity lurching forth from a cloud of talcum powder like Joseph Merrick uncovered to the world at a penny gaff show on the Whitechapel Road. Paint dribbles towards the base of the picture like sticky boiled sweets spat out by the Toddler.

Rose, oil on board, Aileen Murphy

A series of pensive felines peer across the gallery; their ears pricked forward inquisitivly at their chaotic neighbours. Shhhhhhhh. Their tightly curled bodies are wound up and ready to pounce or scram in an instant. The cats’ senses are attuned to the chemical substances permeating the air; pheromones surrounding them and painted in electric colours. Their hackles rise as they become acutely aware of every change in scent, heat or movement.

Rose and Mary’s Cat will remain perturbed by the sex and surrealism around them but tricolor Tom Cat reclines, head and tail out of the frame, as his pink penis protrudes from his body. Have you heard the way the cats yowl at night in the car park across the road from the gallery?

Some fruits and flowers also have barbed tips and prickly skin to ward away prying hands and insects but others welcome curious fingers and proboscises.

Megabats are frugivorous and nectarivorous. They either have sharp teeth to pierce hard fruit skins or long tongues that are inserted deep into a flower, collecting pollen on the way, which is then transferred to the next blossom. Cross-pollination allows the flora to reproduce, and hybrid strains of a species to emerge.

Some plants expel toxic fumes into the air or sweet perfumed flurries; others purify their atmosphere. The NASA Clean Air Study demonstrates that certain common household plants naturally remove toxins such as benzene, formaldehyde and trichloroethylene from the air helping to counteract the effects of sick building syndrome.

A Teacher checks his txts before class starts. New Message. 3Message. To restore 3 data services, please access your device settings. <Messages. Edit. Delete. He glances up and catches his own gaze in the staffroom mirror. Camera. Click. He stares blankly at his own self-portrait on the tiny greasy screen. He doesn’t notice the jizzing cocks and bulbous tits graffitied on the wall behind him. The biology students have done their homework.

Schoolboys in Wolves Clothes, Oil on Canvas, Sheila Rennick

In the classroom a protractor spins across one of the desks as a boy lurches back in his seat. Some of his fellow classmates look on or away in dismay. A pack of lads with wolf carcasses draped over their heads point their fingers at the startled teen. His face has morphed into that of a soured Guanajuato mummy. They pull their triggers. A simple sketch of a sunrise or utopian domed sanctuary drifts to the floor.

At the top of a candy-coloured precipice, a lone figure surveys a barren but beautiful landscape. Reminiscent of the Huangshan UNESCO World Heritage Site following a cataclysmic disaster, the nuclear scorched peaks with sparse unnatural foliage reach to the heavens. The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is revealed to be American television and social media personality, Kim Kardashian. She clutches the shrunken head of her husband, rapper and entrepreneur, Kanye West. It is hard to imagine why she has undertaken this perilous journey and how she will survive in this newly emerging world.

Yesterday’s seductress Salome sits above her table like a disinterested Sheela na gig. A silver platter rests before her but rather than the head of a decapitated prophet, the small kitten on the scarlet table cloth next to her sniffs a rock-pool of baptised shellfish.

A fried egg plummets through the blackness of space towards a copulating couple within the screen of a tiny television. The aerial is tuned to the correct frequency and it takes a second to realise that it is the bed shuddering and not the transmitted image. But it’s not going to happen tonight. An egg needs to be fertilised and incubated before a world can be created, before life can emerge, before an eye can open.”

Michael Hill, June 2015

Posted by Kristina Huxley

On and off the wall

Andro Wekua, from the show ‘1995’ at the Gladstone Gallery, 2010. Click here for more work by this artist.

Posted by Madeleine Moore

Hurvin Andersen

Hurvin Andersen, Untitled (Black Street), 2000, oil on canvas, 150 x 239 cm

Hurvin Anderson draws from his heritage as second generation Jamaican-British; the subjects of his paintings are developed from both of these cultures, overlapping his parents’ generation’s experiences with his own. This sense of something familiar yet detached is conveyed through his canvases in their dislocated sense of place and hazy interpretation of detail. Anderson works from photographs rather than actual memory, a process which further enhances his aesthetic of distance. He shows with the Thomas Dane Gallery. For more information click here.

Posted by Madeleine Moore

Andreas Hofer

‘It seems that anything goes in Andreas Hofer’s artistic universe. You’re as likely to encounter dinosaurs as comic-book heroes, Nazis, Sigmund Freud, John Wayne, Veronica Lake or spacemen and cowboys. With scant regard for chronological decorum or the tyranny of taste, his subjects are cut loose from history, to gallivant through a parallel world where their usual meaning slips away. The media carrying this overloaded pantheon of fantastical and historical characters are just as diverse. The German artist’s exhibitions have featured comic-strip drawings on notebook paper reminiscent of boyhood doodles, messily gestural painting moving between suprematist-inspired abstractions and figuration; collages, enormous sculptures and collections of junk-store treasures. ‘

Article on Andreas Hofer by Skye Sherwin, the Guardian.

Read more here

Posted by Madeleine Moore

Interview with Merlin James and James Hyde

A conversation between the painters James Hyde and Merlin James, talking about their practices. Read it here

Posted by Madeleine Moore

Land Of Paint – article by Noel Sheridan, 1997

What a wonderful and strange place it is this “Land of Paint” and everyone who paints wants to get there. You get into it as much by touch as by sight. How heavy or light the touch; how considered or spontaneous the hand movement; what freight of colour or viscosity of pigment gets carried on the journey begins to settle this land. You make a beginning so you can start to look. Then you can travel. Where you want to go is a place you have never been before. You know when you arrive that it will be a place you seem to know. What makes it familiar is something from the past and also something of the future – a promise. But the main thing about this land is that it must be made to exist in time present. As authentic as a tea cup, taking its time and space.
As the painting begins to insist on its space occupying your space you negotiate an uneasy contract, between you and it, which sets the lie of this land. Touch and look your way into it. Then continue the looking for a” long time. Nothing gets your concentrated attention like this; your eye’s are peeled; looking for a long time. until everything is radiant, significant. It looks interesting. You look at the floor; that now looks equally radiant, significant and interesting. More interesting because it is ‘really in the world, part of it, authentic, stupifyingly real. Not a representation, not a blueprint, nothing at a remove, but right there, now. This is what you want the paint to be. But you are seeing too much. The half of painting that is pain begins to operate here. Begin again.
Touch our way in, scraping, layering, digging out, plastering on, scraping off. Looking, looking. The eye skating on it, sinking into it. There are two speeds. The first slick and shiny; the eye races across the paint surface, skidding away. The second, glutinous, slow motion lava; tracing the imperceptible movement and growth of stone. Ancient, lithic, grey…. Just paint.
Bring light to this place. Everything receives light but painting contends that light; trapping it so that this dumb, resilient, buttery paint seems to radiate a light of itself. It is the hopeless faith in that impossibility that makes this land of paint so human, touching and sometimes amazing.

The worst is not over, yet I know
You will be happy here. Because of the logic
Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.
Tender and insouciant by turns, you see
You have built a mountain of something.
Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,
Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears. John Ashbery

Take heart from the cliche “dumb as a painter”. Press on. Concepts such as “landscape” are merely hooks to memory that steady the eye. What traps and holds the eye is an adhesiveness special to this place of paint. It is another world and part of getting into it comes with the realization that, as you look at it, it is looking at you. (If everyday things in the world start to look at you, something is wrong; if painting does not do it, something is wrong.)
Look how it looks. That sweeping scan of stops and glides that sometimes stall to saturation; glimpses that flick as highlights, slow searches that drag across the surface only to be turned as trummels that impede, spur and lift to hover forever. This is a look to which even time cannot bring repose – for time is what is missing from this land. It is language that unfolds in time; in this place of space
…. time has turned into space and there will be no more time. Beckett.
Consider scale. Whether we see this land as detail or panorama – it could be either – is incidental to the size and scale of the painting itself. Sometimes you get the small, one-shot size; you see it in one take. These are like babies and they hold the fascination of babies; designed for success and even small ‘peculiarities’ seem full of promise. All seems nascent, full of broiling potential and they are the ideal size for the eye to hold and feed. When they get bigger they demand attention at the uneasy periphery of vision. And look at the time they take ! We want these unruly adolescents – or curmudgeonly elders – to simply stay in the frame that is our conceptual frame. It should be landscape but it’s paint; it should be paint but it’s behaving like weather; it makes sense now – close up – but what is it doing over there, and now where has it gone? These paintings are grown ups – you don’t so much understand as accept them – and they are not so easily accommodated by the eye which must now give time and thought to come to terms with the fact that this moiling mass, macro or micro, will be eternally
…. causing some features palpably nearer your pecker’to be
swollen up most grossly while the further back we manage to
wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the
hen saw. Tip.                                                                            Joyce.
And besides, you can’t help thinking – if only you could stop thinking – this is a bad time to be painting. It is as incorrect as the Full Irish Breakfast – and for many of the same reasons. Blood, ghee, muscle and brains condensed into a life threatening assault on the system is dangerous. It could be a matter of life and death; the risk level is high; taking terrible chances. And what has any of that to do with art? That was then. Now read today’s menu: “Vegetarian sausage with just a hint of hickory”. That weasel “hint of” points modishly to the fact that you have the wrong agenda.
But you know, you just feel, that deep down what everyone wants is the art equivalent of the F.I.B: the Velasquez, the Goya, the Vuillard, the de Stael, the Guston, the de Kooning, the Reubens and yes – the Bacon. The full edible listing. The Ates.
Turn back from these trophic metaphors; they lead to the same queasy euphoria that confuses the floor with the painting. What is needed now is something to prevent the painting becoming linoleum. You have buried the natural light of the blank board where those original marks danced and took their first breaths. You have layered and pulled and tried to save interesting passages that finally had to go under because the logic of this place had begun to take a different turn. This has led you into darker dullnesses where everything seems to die under your hand. Thick and synthetic as lino, it bends and buckles, its light has gone. It can be designed now anyway you push it. It gives but there is no take. There is no resistance. This is the terror of abstraction; how to stop it being design. (Design is a problem solving activity; art solves nothing – just more questions.) Where you are now, numbed in this paintland, needs craft; something that works. What do you know from the past that might revive it? Salmon pink will never again travel as miraculously as it did across the silver grey of the small Infanta’s dress, but try. There will never be touch like that again, but go on. Not under or over but on and in. That may help, maybe that pink has brought something flickering to life. Believe it. Begin again.
What a wonderful and strange place this is. You think you may now know this place because you have traversed it some time ago and traces remain of your having been there. You have shifted things and things have shifted you. You recognise things you made happen but most interesting are things that just happened and …. just appeared out of this land. These are the events that constitute the reason you do this.
Still, elements feel wrong. (like ‘constitute’ . What you want is ‘consistency’ – in the medium that is – like ‘sinewy’. No that’s wrong too. Go back. Erase. And loose the breakfast section. Won’t fit. And that part about pictures looking was wrong. Try again).
It is not that the painting looks at you – it is usually too involved with itself for that – but, if you get into this land, it will show signs of your looking out. This is called style.
Press on past these ideas of signs and style. They must emerge – occur. If you carry their freight into this land they will hang out or wander the place like bleating sheep, cute and lost. Think dumb, then maybe, if you have truly entered this land of paint, and if you are lucky there will be a moment when you feel you can’t make a mistake. You may be wrong but something of your stuff and its stuff has arrived. Just pinch its cheeks, brush its hair, straighten its dress. It’s behaving itself, maybe. Send it out into the world. (An act of faith of course, but how sustaining it is, the lie of this land).
This now is something from the land of paint. It has light. Look at it looking. Thoughtfully pouring all of your energy into this single monument, you have signed off on this contract. You will be happy here. There is a logic to this place. Lighten up.

‘The Vision of Mac Conglinne’
Haunch of Mutton
Is my dog’s name
Of lovely leaps. (From the 6th century Irish)

Noel Sheridan 1997

Posted by Robert Armstrong