Showing posts with label Belle Epoch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Belle Epoch. Show all posts

31/01/2017

Jonathan Yeo: The Schizophrenic Neo-Society Painter

On Thursday 19th September 2013, Carol and I watched a documentary on Jonathan Yeo who was incredibly being given an exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London. I frankly seethed with contempt for Yeo’s illustrative and mannered kitsch portraits. I noticed, that almost as an aside, we saw Yeo take photographs of his sitters even though he then went on to make a show of painting them from life. Yet his finished work looked more the product of the camera than real study from life. Carol pointedly compared Yeo’s style to the illustrations in Woman’s Way in the 1980’s. I thought his paintings said virtually nothing about Yeo’s sitters and the only thing they said about Yeo was his taste in illustrative artists which he pastiched. There was no there - there, in Yeo’s work which was superficial and devoid of spirit. I found his rendering of faces boring and lacking any real psychological depth and his scrubbed and splattered backgrounds offensively mannered. Another small, technical, studio related reason I hated Yeo, was my disgust at his affected piling up dirty cakes of half-dry oil paint on his dirty pallet – the kind of stupid, wasteful thing - only a painter with no sense of the cost or value of oil paint would do.                              

I had seen countless artists on deviantart as technically skilled and intellectually bankrupt - but I supposed they did not have Yeo’s easy entrée into high-society or gift for self-publicity. Like so many successful people, he was apparently easy to get along with, apolitical and happy to provide the rich with a glamorous lie about themselves. I wondered what it said about art and society in 2013 that the most successful portrait artist in Britain, was in the mould of the style over substance Giovanni Boldini from the tail end of the Belle Epoch a hundred years before.                                                                                    

As with late salon portrait painters like Giovanni Boldini and Antonio Mancini, I noticed that there was a dramatic discontinuity between Yeo’s faces and backgrounds – a schizophrenic schism between illustrative portrait conventions and attempts to be fashionably painterly in the areas around the face. This may seem like a minor issue but from the first time I saw Antonio Mancini’s portraits in The Hugh Lane Museum in the mid-80s - it was an issue I had thought about a lot. I found the difference between Mancini’s heavily impastoed - almost expressionistic backgrounds - and his more conventionally naturalistic face painting - odd and not fully convincing. Even though I liked Mancini’s work, I thought he had failed to reinvent the whole surface of the picture in the radical way that Cézanne had and thus it gave Mancini’s work a schizophrenic look - torn between the traditional past and the expressive future. As for Boldini, this schism between figure and ground, had led him to use bold gestural brushstrokes in the areas surrounding the figure - that suggested proto-futurism or even proto-Abstract-Expressionism but unlike de Kooning, Boldini did not go on to deconstruct the figure. Instead, Boldini rendered the faces of his society sitters, in a perfectly modelled naturalistic way that would have been acceptable to any academic hack.                                     

A hundred years later, Jonathan Yeo, painted faces in either an uninspired blended manner that was merely a pastiche of nineteenth century academic technique or painted them in a schematic and soulless pastiche of Lucien Freud’s method of building up form through a broken patchwork of brushstrokes. But Yeo painted these conventional faces on top of an artily scrubbed background that suggested nth generation Abstract Expressionism. So like his early twentieth century counterparts, Yeo’s work was a dishonest confection of styles whose instant success - was testament to its essentially kitsch character. The inherently theatrical nature of Yeo’s work was highlighted by his sitter’s love of dressing up and presenting themselves has ham actors - inventing their own media personas. Thus Yeo’s work was lie impacted upon lie to create a glamorous illusion that simply did not convince.                                                                                        

A couple of weeks later I saw Parkinson Meets Jonathan Yeo on Sky Arts, which I watched with the relish of a critic. I thought Yeo’s porno collage of George Bush gimmicky and typically neutered like most artistic attempts to appropriate porn. It also galled me to think, I had collaged porn into my paintings decades before Yeo - and had just got abuse - not the middle-class tittering that greeted Yeo’s wannabe bad boy posturing. As for Yeo’s paintings about plastic surgery (where Yeo had painted in the marks made by plastic surgeons before operating) they simply reminded me of poor imitations of Jenny Saville’s far superior work decades before. As I watched Parkinson’s banal, middle-brow, television show, without a shred of intellectual weight, I realized that another part of Yeo’s success was his shameless desire to be loved by such an audience and convince them that he really was up there with artists like Picasso and Sargent - and at the cutting edge of contemporary art.                                

14/03/2014

Sir John Lavery: Passion and Politics



I

Around me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;
Kevin O’Higgins’ countenance that wears
A gentle questioning look that cannot hide
A soul incapable of remorse or rest;
A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;

II

An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand                                                                                   
Blessing the Tricolour. ‘This is not’, I say                                                                                                  
‘The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland
The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.’
Before a woman’s portrait suddenly I stand,
Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.
I met her all but fifty years ago
For some twenty minutes in some studio.

III

Heart-smitten with emotion I sink down,
My heart recovering with covered eyes;
Wherever I had looked I had looked upon
My permanent or impermanent images:
Augusta Gregory’s son; her sister’s son,
Hugh Lane, ‘onlie begetter’ of all these;
Hazel Lavery living and dying, that tale
As though some ballad-singer had sung it all;

W. B. Yeats, The Municipal Gallery Revisited, Selected Poems, Penguin Books, 2000, P. 203-204.

On Wednesday 4th August 2009, Carol and I made a rare trip into town together to see “Sir John Lavery: Passion and Politics” in The Dublin City Municipal Gallery Hugh Lane. This exhibition of works mostly from 1909-1935, brought together Lavery’s series of political portraits, historical records of events in the birth of the Irish Free State, alongside the softer and loving works he devoted to his wife Hazel.                                               
I was thirty-nine and the longest I had ever been out of Ireland had been nineteen days, yet Irish history had always baffled and wearied me. So many angry partisans, so many different names, so many twists and turns, so many advances and so many retreats, so many different angry interpretations and so much bloodshed. I had avoided it like a sane man avoids a fight in a pub. Nevertheless, this exhibition taught me more in a few hours than years of hearing it being droned on about in school on TV and on the Radio. Perhaps because I am dyslexic I found putting faces to names a more direct experience. The small but detailed and well-illustrated catalogue by Sinead McCoole was an excellently researched story of the Lavery’s life in Ireland and his love affair with Hazel that made the period come alive with intrigue and gossip. Yet, I searched in vain in the catalogue to find an actual analysis of the merits of the canvases within art history, Lavery’s craft or lack of it or his intellectual ambitions as an artist if he had any. However, my main concern was to judge the paintings on their own merits.                 
                                  
In my lifetime, I could not remember the last major exhibition of paintings by Lavery who was one of the most important painters in Ireland in the 1920s alongside William Orpen and Jack B. Yeats. Orpen was the prodigy with amazing technical skill but who lacked a heart or many original ideas, Lavery was the showman with enormous ambition and above-average talent but conservative aesthetics and Yeats the moderately skilled genius whose work avoided the traps of virtuosity to capture not just the external appearance of the Irish but their expressive soul as well.                         
                                           
Sir John Lavery was born to a Catholic family in Belfast in 1856. His father was a humble publican in Belfast but then his wine and spirit trade in Belfast failed. In 1859, his father set sail for America hoping to make a better life for his family whom he hoped to bring over once he had found a home for them. Tragically, his ship foundered on a sand bank off Wexford. He was drowned and three months later, his wife died of unknown causes. Lavery, his orphaned elder brother and younger sister were split-up amongst members of the family. Lavery lived first with his uncle a farmer in County Antrim, then with another relative in Saltcoats in Scotland and his childhood was not too harsh. He remembered the Orangemen marches that would frighten the catholic children and learned from this how to keep quiet when in a minority. He worked for a while as a clerk with the Glasgow railway and later in a pawnshop. Then he took up drawing and got a job as a photographers assistant retouching photographs. Perhaps this early experience of photography influenced the photographic looking compositions of his later paintings.                                                                                                                  
                     

In the 1870s Glasgow was an industrial and ship building powerhouse with a burgeoning middle class and energetic art world, so it was a good starting point for an ambitious art student. In the late 1870s Lavery trained in the Haldane Academy the predecessor of The Glasgow School of Art, the training he received was rudimentary and uninventive. His earliest masterpieces were in watercolour. Lavery was not a prodigy, and his career was that of an over achiever who worked tirelessly and never missed an opportunity to push his art.                                                                                    
      
                       
His sister Jane, came to live with him as his housekeeper while he worked long hours on his art. Jane became involved with a young pawnbroker and got pregnant. Her lover fled to America and Lavery insisted Jane follow him to America. She found him and the pair married and returned to live with Lavery in Glasgow. Jane became pregnant a second time but her marriage was clearly not going to work. One night she came to Lavery’s studio door seeking solace. Lavery consumed by his work turned her away and two days later, she threw herself from Stockwell Bridge into the Clyde. Lavery was devastated by her death and his shocking guilt. For a time he attended confession, but out of a need for self-preservation he tried to move on. However, it would remain one of his greatest sorrows. Late in life, he would paint Jane from an old photograph and this painting was the first illustration in his memoirs ‘The Life of a Painter’ published before his death.                                                                                      
                
After claiming insurance on a fire in his studio, and in order to advance his training he travelled to Paris to study at the Academie Julian a popular school for British and American students. Lavery was instructed by his hero William Adolphe Bouguereau the famed academic who took the drawing of Ingres to produce soft-core nudes along ancient themes that were the delight of the salon. As Lavery noted to a friend, Bouguereau gave him little encouragement: “Though I work as hard as any of the others, my drawing was poor and neither Bouguereau nor Fleury ever gave me much praise. Pas mal or pas trop mal was about the most I got for encouragement. I discovered that what I thought were my strong points counted for little and that I had yet to understand what drawing really meant.” (Quoted from Sir John Lavery, Kenneth McConkey, Canongate Press, Edinburgh, 1993, P. 19.) Lavery said he learned more by looking than listening at the Academie Julian. However, despite his criticism of the teaching there, it imbued him with a mental vigour that would serve him well. Lavery came under the spell of the plein-air naturalist painter Bastien-Lepage who was painting modern subjects in the French countryside, and in 1883, he spent a happy summer at the artist colony of Grez-sur-Loing painting in the open air. The colony was made up of mostly American and British artists, though there were also Scandinavian and even Japanese painters in Grez-sur-Long. Lavery became very friendly with Frank O’Meara an Irish painter of subdued, melancholy paintings. Lavery was neither a revolutionary nor a strict academic, rather he sought to marry the drawings skills, fidelity to form and tonal realism of academic painting to the bright, modern day colours of the plein-air painters and their creed of painting from contemporary life. Lavery was never a radical like the Impressionist who disintegrated the world into a field of broken brushstrokes that would eventually lead to the Pointillism. Rather he sought to marry his drawing skills with the painterliness of Velázquez and the intense light effects of the plein-air painters. In this, he was similar to John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, and Joaquin Sorolla all of whom would tread a highly profitable middle road between the extremes of both the old and new world. Nor was he an intellectual or deeply emotional painter and one searches in vain to find a critique of modern life like one finds in Manet or Degas. His work was often beautiful and at times, it could be profoundly moving, but mostly he revelled in a hard-won virtuosity married to lush colours.                     

In 1885, he returned to Glasgow armed with the skills of plein-air painting and completed ‘The Tennis Party’ a painting of a fashionable contemporary bourgeois subject that quickly established his reputation in Britain. Lavery amongst other Glasgow artists was invited to exhibit in Munich and ‘The Glasgow Boys’ as they became know, were critically acclaimed.                                                                  

In 1888, Lavery secured his first major commission to paint The State visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow Exhibition. At the actual visit, Lavery painted a small sketch, but the final large canvas would take him two years of dogged work. In the process, he painted about 250 individual commissioned portraits of the great and good that had been at the visit - which he then integrated into the final canvas. It was an arduous task for a young painter who had to travel the length and breadth of England, Scotland and Ireland to paint his sitters. Included amongst these portraits were ones of Queen Victoria and her grand-daughter Princess Alix who later became the last Tsarina of Russia. Refusing to use a photograph, Lavery painted the Queen in Windsor Castle from life. The commissions gave him amazing access to the great and good and firmly established Lavery as a major portrait painter in Britain.                                       

Around the same time Lavery became romantically involved with an ‘Irish’ flower seller called Kathleen MacDermott, who he would only discover after her death was in fact a welsh girl whose real name was Annie Evans. She was also dying of tuberculosis. Concerned that his professional reputation would be damaged, Lavery persuaded a friend called William Patrick Whyte to take Kathleen to health resorts and live with her in a village outside Glasgow, where Lavery would visit her daily. This “Irish beauty” became pregnant and bore him a daughter called Eileen, before dying a few months later on 1st November 1891. Yet again, more concerned with his career, Lavery left his daughter Eileen in the care of his friend William Patrick Whyte, while he travelled around Europe. However, she would remain an important part of his life and she would visit him often in later life.                                                                         

In 1890, he made the first of many trips to paint in Morocco following in the footsteps of Orientalists like Delacroix and Jean-Leon Gerome who found the exotic life and strong light highly stimulating. During 1892, Lavery toured Europe, and his study of Velázquez in Spain was to have a profound impact on his ambitions as a painter. Lavery like many artists of the time was infatuated with Spanish art and many of his canvases of this time paid homage to the Spanish court painters. Lavery moved to London in 1896 and through sheer determination, a measure of talent and the skills of a consummate operator he carved a place for himself as one of the most sought after portrait painters of the day alongside Whistler and Sargent. Whistler was to influence Lavery’s work and the two became close friends.                             
                                                                                                             
In the summer of 1903, at the artist colony Beg-Meil in France Lavery first met Hazel Martyn who was with her widowed mother and teenage sister Dorothea. Hazel Martyn was an American amateur painter and printmaker from Chicago of some talent. Her mother was willing to indulge Hazel’s interest in art until she could find a suitable husband. She was twenty-nine and he was forty-seven, yet despite the age difference there was an instant attraction. He marvelled at her large heavily lidded eyes. She was to become his greatest muse, confidant and social companion. However, her mother disapproved of their relationship and their courtship would be a convoluted one. Her mother summoned Dr Edward (Ned) Livingston Trudeau Snr, Hazel’s most eligible suitor to come to France. Hazel was forced to marry Dr. Trudeau, and even wrote to Lavery on her wedding day that she was marrying against her wishes. The marriage was short lived, for Ned Trudeau while recuperating from pneumonia died of a pulmonary embolism. Hazel was pregnant with his child and gave birth to a daughter Alice. It was only after her mother’s death in 1909, that the couple married in the same year. 

He had the talent and industriousness and she had the looks, glamour and networking skills. Hazel turned Lavery’s studio at 5 Cromwell Place in London into a salon where the celebrities of the day socialized. She seems to have channelled her creative energies into Lavery’s career at the expense of her own ambitions. Hazel became a trendsetter and fashion icon of the day, known for her beauty, charm and conversation, while Lavery would record the events of their life. Hazel was to feature in about 400 of Lavery’s paintings and was photographed by the great photographers of the day like E.O. Hoppe and later Cecil Beaton. She was photographed by The Tatler and Vogue, copies of which were shown alongside other memorabilia at the exhibition.

By 1910, Lavery’s star was at its peak and he had many exhibitions in Europe and America as well as having over fifty works exhibited at the 1910 Venice Biennale. He was both critically acclaimed and rich beyond the dreams of most young painters. In his role as portraitist, Lavery was to record many of the key figures in the English parliament and military. He painted the English Royal Family a number of times and Hazel was to teach Winston Churchill to paint. The Lavery’s befriended many in the British establishment but they were then to risk it all by befriending many in the Irish Republican movement. That John and Hazel managed to maintain friendships with such warring parties in a moment of such revolution was a credit to their diplomatic characters.                                   


                                                  
As such, Lavery was the consummate painter-diplomat who could at least in this respect only be compared with Rubens. Sadly as a painter, he was nowhere near the latter’s genius. In fact, even in his own day his skills were no match for John Singer Sargent the ultimate sensual portraitist to the idle rich. As a man though, Lavery was a more complex figure and one far more involved with the society of his time. Both were bravura painters whose God of painting was Velázquez.                                                     


What was the key to Velázquez? Brushwork! The Spanish genius of painting turned painting from the mere filling in of linear contour drawing into a fireworks display of brushwork that from a distance registered as the most naturalistic and believable painting one could wish for – yet when seen close up was revealed to be a magical series of deft, highly intelligent brushstrokes. It was a supremely aristocratic form of painting. Plebeian painters had to toil away at their canvases working and re-working them to death, but elite painters like Velázquez - could produce the same effect with an economy of means that beggared belief. Of course, the apparent brevity of Velázquez was a pose he affected. Painting is as much an intellectual activity as a physical one. In his early canvases, he had worked very hard to achieve a proto-photographic realism and it was only after years of painting, studying the masters and thinking about painting that he achieved the bravura mastery - for which he has now become a legend amongst painters. In the nineteenth century, Velázquez’s reputation amongst painters was at its zenith. His example was taught in most academies in Europe and it was this approach that Lavery, Sargent, Sorolla, and a host of other portrait painters were drilled in. If in brushwork Velázquez was a ten, then Sargent was a seven, Lavery and Sorolla at their best only a six. They were all stylish and appealing but they were essentially mannerists and fundamentally lacked the intellectual gravity and aristocratic authenticity of the master. Yet their style was immensely appealing to the ruling elite in Europe at the time who saw this style as ‘real art’ as opposed to the intentionally shocking work of bohemians, immigrants, anarchists and rebels that lived stunted lives in Montparnasse. You know the likes of van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, Chagall, Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine.                                
        
Ironically, the Irish Republicans, Ulster Unionists and English establishment could agree on one thing – Lavery was a proper artist - worthy of their time and patronage. Today the place of Lavery’s art is as mere historical record, his paintings led to nothing new or important in European art. How such political and para-military men would have felt with a Cubified portrait by Picasso, a wraithlike portrait by Kokoschka or a convulsed portrait by Soutine can only be guessed at, but one can only assume they would not have been happy. And perhaps in the long run they would be right, because the value of these works, lies precisely in their accord with appearances and character and thus their value as ‘objective’, historical, visual documents. Yet at times Lavery’s portraits verged on the Expressionistic, so brisk and self-taught his approach appeared. Especially in his ecclesiastical portraits, Lavery verged on an Expressionism not too dissimilar to late Corinth, Munch or Kokoschka. Repeatedly, I starred infuriated at canvases that had clearly not been resolved, filled with gauche mistakes and evidence of haste and carelessness that Lavery had still deemed to sign.                                                                                  

During World War I he was an Official War Artist for Britain. Most of his paintings were of the home front, troops embarking on ships and warships in harbour, but at the age of sixty he also got up in a balloon to paint the North Sea conveys attacked by U-boats. For his services, he was awarded a knighthood in 1918. He was elected Royal Academician in 1921 and by the end of his life, he was also a member of The Royal Hibernian Academy, The Royal Scottish Academy and The Royal Academies of Rome, Antwerp, Milan, Brussels and Stockholm.      

Lavery had lived most of his life abroad and saw himself as an international artist. Sinead McCoole in the catalogue suggested that after Hazel’s death, in an attempt to revive her reputation, and deflect attention from his own patriotism, Lavery over credited Hazel with their move to Ireland. It was Hazel who had Irish roots on her Grandmothers side that encouraged Lavery to return to Ireland and take part in its cultural life. Like many America’s, Hazel’s view of Ireland was romantic and idealised whereas Lavery had a far more hard-headed view of his native land. He described Hazel’s view of Ireland “as unreal as a mirage in the desert.” Their first trip to Ireland was in 1913 when they stayed with Lord and Lady Kenmare in Killarney. Persuaded by Sir Hugh Lane that Ireland need to rediscover its visual heritage and bring the best of Modern Art to Ireland for the education of young students of art, Lavery became part of a new Irish art world struggling to define a nation and became friends with other Irish painters like William Orpen.                                                                                                          

Two of Lavery’s first Irish political portraits were of Sir Edward Carson the Unionist leader and John Redmond the Nationalist leader both of whom sat for him in 1916. Like most of the other Irish paintings on show, they were not commissioned works. Redmond remarked that, “I have always had an idea that Carson and I might someday be hanged side-by-side in Dublin.” (Sinead McCoole, Passion and Politics, Sir John Lavery: Revisiting The Salon, 2010, P. 62.) When Carson saw the two portraits, he remarked to Lavery “It’s easy to see which side you’re on.” (Sinead McCoole, Passion and Politics, Sir John Lavery: Revisiting The Salon, 2010, P. 63.)                                                                                                                             
                      
The trial of Sir Roger Casement for treason, after the failed Easter Rising, began to stir Lavery’s patriotic feelings. In 1916, without a commission, Lavery painted the appeal trial of Sir Roger Casement who was facing the death sentence for conspiring with the Germans to ship guns into Ireland on the eve of the Easter Rising. The result of the appeal was a foregone conclusion, and Casement’s reputation had been further damaged by the publication of photographs of ‘the black diaries’ and allegations of homosexuality. Sir Casement was eventually hanged in Pentonville Prison London on 3ed August 1916. Without a commission and risking his professional career, Lavery painted the appeal trial from the Jury box. The press were outraged that he would undertake such a work “Of all the trials not to paint, the Casement trial I should have thought would have had first place. But Lavery, the debonair, had gone right through with the painful task...(Sinead McCoole, Passion and Politics, Sir John Lavery: Revisiting The Salon, 2010, P. 66.) The exhibition included both the medium sized sketch for ‘The Trial of Roger Casement’ and the final vast version. Unhelpfully they were not hung together, but even in lingering memory between floors, it was clear the moving sketch was a far superior painting to the final version, which was merely a wooden period piece. The more sympathetic original sketch had included more Irish supports as well as Hazel sitting wearing a hat in the balcony. The finished canvas had no balcony and was more coldly objective. Moreover in the sketch, the liveliness of the painting suggested that there was still a chance Casement could win his appeal, while in the finished painting there was a grave certainty about his doom. In both, Casement appeared lost behind bars in the dock, amongst a sea of Barristers and interested parties. Lavery offered the finished painting to the National Portrait Gallery in London, but they unsurprisingly declined the offer and it is still on loan in Ireland. As a result of his painting of the Casement trial, Lavery came into contact with many of the key figures in Irish Republicanism.    
                                                
The atrocities of the Black and Tans, further angered Lavery. Winston Churchill, Lavery’s good friend asked him for his assessment of the Irish issue. Lavery wrote back “... I believe that Ireland will never be governed by Westminster, the Vatican or Ulster without continuous bloodshed. I also believe the removal of the Castle and all its works, leaving Irishmen to settle their own affairs, is the only solution left... Love is stronger than hate.(Sinead McCoole, Passion and Politics, Sir John Lavery: Revisiting The Salon, 2010, P. 71.) As Sinead McCoole pointed out, much of the wording was Hazel’s and she signed the letter first. In 1921, at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Hazel and John provided an open house for the two parties to meet in a private and convivial atmosphere and many credit them with a significant role in achieving the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.

Lavery was a serious portrait painter at his best – one who could read into the character and worries of his sitters. The strain of times could be clearly read in the faces of De Villera, Collins and O’Higgins whose balding forehead seemed to writhe with worry and angst. Many Irish artists before and since Lavery, have created artworks relating to Irish history, but I could think of none who had risked their reputations and lives in the process like Lavery. In fact, most Irish historical and political works were made at a remove from real events and so it was a credit to Lavery’s courage and talent that he produced such seminal works during Ireland’s greatest upheaval.                                                                          

At the exhibition, I quickly grew tired of Hazel’s evident narcissism and smug need for theatrical display in canvas after canvas, photograph after photograph. You did not have to be a feminist to find this woman’s desperate need to be seen as one of the delightful and beguiling lovelies of her day galling. Still, some of the greatest paintings in the exhibition were of Hazel and Lavery was clearly besotted with her despite her dalliances with younger men. Hazel was rumoured to have had affairs with both Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins before both were assassinated the first in 1922 the second in 1927, though Sinead McCoole tended to downplay the affair with Collins. On Collins body, was found a letter from Hazel, and after his death Hazel wanted to wear widows weeds to his funeral, but out of respect for fiancée Kitty Kiernan she was persuaded not to. After Collin’s assassination, Lavery painted him laid-out from life, Michael Collins (Love of Ireland), was a heroic masterpiece almost Napoleonic in its solemn grandeur. Critics like Moya Llewelyn Davies described the couple as “publicity hunters, running after the men of the moment, the one to paint, the other to embrace!” (Sinead McCoole, Passion and Politics, Sir John Lavery: Revisiting The Salon, 2010, P. 117.) However, that would be a gross simplification of their motives and it failed to take account of the risks and sacrifices they made to contribute to Irish art and politics. Attempts were also made on the Lavery’s lives, but they continued to commit their lives and art to Ireland.

In paintings like ‘The Blessing of the Colours’ from 1922, Lavery’s sympathies were even more clearly spelled out. In the middle distance an Archbishop (thought to be Dr Edward Byrne) flanked by a choir boy holding the bible to the right, raised his right hand in blessing to the Irish Tricolour which was spot lit as it was held proudly by a kneeling Irish soldier to the left. The three-figure composition reminded me of academic student ‘masterpieces’ like Picasso’s ‘First Communion’ of 1896. Yet whereas Picasso’s youthful work looked staged and slightly absurd, Lavery’s dramatic ‘Blessing of the Colours’ was a call to arms. Not an overtly patriot man, I never the less felt a lump in my throat when I looked at this masterpiece of Irish nationalism. Picasso quickly moved on from such old-fashioned pictures to revolutionize Modern painting in ways that went beyond narrative work, but Lavery never moved on, perhaps to Ireland’s parochial benefit.                                                                                                   
                      
Most of Lavery’s paintings were dark toned and they were thus unhelpfully lit by direct daylight by the galleries. This meant that it was almost impossible to see some of these canvases through the glare of sunlight. Others were annoyingly hung under glass that only doubled the problems for the viewer. Apart from a fine charcoal drawing of Hazel there was a dearth of drawings.                            
             
I was shocked to see the condition of Lavery’s paintings. About 60% were severely cracked – damming proof of his hasty craft. Using colours like Van Dyke brown which are notoriously unstable and prone to bubbling, painting in so much haste that he failed to let each successive layers appropriate drying time, perhaps even painting thin over fat – he had left ruined canvases. All of this was probably compounded by careless storage and maintenance by careless Anglo-Irish owners.             

In order to produce a balanced record of Ireland in 1920s, Lavery visited the north to paint the portraits of both Nationalists and Unionists like The Rt. Hon. Hugh O’Neill and The Most Hon. The Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, First Speaker of the Senate of Northern Ireland and clergymen like the Archbishops of Armagh.            

Yet one senses that he had less sympathy for them. While the men of the south looked like tortured romantic thinkers and warriors those from the North often appeared arrogant and proud. Lavery even painted an Orangeman 12th of July march in Portadown in 1928 and this lively street scene was one of his best. He may have been frightened of these marches as a child, yet he recorded it dispassionately and even with some painterly relish.                                                                                                                             


In 1927, Lavery was commissioned to produce the artwork for the first Irish Free State bank notes. He painted a portrait of Hazel as Kathleen Ni Houlihan that was then converted into a banknote. The exhibition included not only the untypically spare painting but also the banknotes it inspired. Hazel leaked the image to the press and there was controversy that a living American woman, twice married, with an English title and a scandalous love life should be given such an honour. However, despite objections the bank notes were issued in 1928, Hazel’s image would grace Irish notes until 1975, and I remembered knowing her beguiling image from these notes as a child. But Hazel ambitions were even greater, she had hoped that John would be made Governor General and that they could live in the luxurious Viceregal Lodge. It was not to be, the public in Ireland had wearied of Hazel’s attention grabbing.                                                        
                                                                                       
Hazel’s had long suffered from illness, but her frailty and poor health became increasingly evident in Lavery’s later paintings of her and when she died in 1935, he painted her coffin lying in a dim room lit by candles, which he recorded with a moving degree of subtlety. Three months later his daughter Eileen died of tuberculosis.                                           
                                                                               
After Hazel’s death Lavery threw himself back into his work. He was invited to Hollywood and painted the likes of child star Shirley Temple. Near the end of his life, Lavery was given the freedom of the city of both Dublin and Belfast. During the Second World War, Lavery’s granddaughter June (one of Eileen’s three daughters) was killed by a German bomb. Lavery died in Kilkenny in 1941. At his death in 1930, his estate was valued at £66, 082 or about €2,000,000 in today’s money. Diplomatically, he bequeathed to The Ulster Museum and the Hugh Lane Museum some of his key works.                 
                     
By the 1970s Lavery was out of fashion with art lovers even in Ireland. His work reeked of privilege and his Irish credentials were not fully appreciated. Modernism had poured scorn on such flashy Belle Epoch portraiture and it was only in the Post-Modern age that the skills and panache of painters like Sargent, Sorolla, Zorn, and Lavery were revaluated. Today they are all enjoying posthumous success with art lovers tired of cryptic and deliberately shocking art works without beauty or skill.                 
                  
After we saw the Lavery exhibition, we went around the permanent collection. My heart broke when I discovered the last rooms were closed due to staff shortages and my heart went out to young students of art deprived of the full museum. After buying my groceries and cigarettes that day, I had €11 in my pocket to last me the whole week but I put €2 in the charity box. They had a side room dedicated to the small canvass of Corot. I told Carol that Corot was renowned as a kind and gentle painter who had helped the destitute and blind Honoré Daumier by giving him a cottage in the country. I also told her how it had been said that Corot was said to be the most forged painter of the nineteenth century. “How do you remember all this stuff?” She gasped. “Oh I don’t know.” I replied. Looking around at the Corot’s, I felt like I was greeting old friends that I had grown up with. Their simplicity, peacefulness and magic still entranced me, even if I was usually attracted more to the hot and heavy.                                                 


Carol loved the Ed and Nancy Kienholz assemblage centred on a real kitchen sink, she also rediscovered the Guston and thought his work could help her transfer the ink drawings she was making at the time onto canvas in a painterly manner that avoided the illustrative traps of most contemporary graphic art.                                                                                                                

                  
Carol instated we looked again at the Harry Clarke stain glass works. I was not that enthusiastic, but once I approached his magical works, I fell under his spell again. We wondered at his immaculate craftsmanship, elegant drawing, dreamy colours and stupefying attention to detail.             


We then went to McDonald’s for dinner. I had a Big Mac Meal and Carol had a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Fries and Strawberry Milkshake. Carol said I looked like the happiest person in McDonald’s as I devoured my Big Mac and French fries. Later we had a look around the bookshops in town, but thankfully, I did not see anything I had to buy.                                                                                                                        
That week I got Kenneth McConkey’s excellent book on Lavery in my local library and spent the following few months, studying Lavery’s art and life. The artist I discovered was immensely complex - as where the times in which he lived. He lived almost as long as Picasso and had a similarly long working life, full of almost as many twists and turns. Lavery may not have revolutionized art like Picasso, nor did he have anything like his genius for invention, nevertheless Lavery’s records of the birth of the Irish Free State remain priceless works. What they both shared was a fanatical and obsessive love for their art often at the expense of those around them.

13/03/2014

Panic Art – A Conservitive Retreat

“For of course I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the esthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails, or someone tying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights… Some Australians feel that this is a confession of antidemocratic sin; but I am no democrat in the field of the arts, the only area – other than sports – in which human inequality can be displayed and celebrated without doing social harm.”
Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir, London: Harvill Secker, 2006, P.31. 

“What is wrong with modern art today – and we might as well say, what will be the death of it – is the fact that we have no strong, powerful academic art that would be worth fighting against. There must be a rule, even if it is a bad one, because the power of art is confirmed by the overcoming of taboos. Removing all obstacles, however, doesn’t mean liberty, [it means] licence – a shallow affair that makes everything spineless, formless, meaningless and void.”
Pablo Picasso in conversation with Christian Zervos in Cahiers d’Art, 10 (1953).

Despite the weirdness of my insanity, shock of my pornographic images, my occasional use of collage and my production of thousands of feckless doodles, most of my art in terms of its technique, craft and ethos - was essentially conservative. Moreover, as sceptical as I was of the so-called classics of Modern art – as a student of art history, I was also perversely in interested in the bad taste of some of art histories famous artistic failures like Hans Makart, Francis Picabia and Bernard Buffett and found their stories of financial success and artistic failure as illuminating as the endless stories of artistic triumph of the Modernist Masters.  

My first introduction to art was through my father. As a wealthy businessman, he had just begun to collect art before he died when I was nearly seven. Our house had many lovely oil paintings of Irish landscapes, Chinese junk boats, lighthouses in Storm tossed seas, even a painting of the view from our house - which my father had commissioned. Dad had also collected a series of wonderful bronze sculptures of naked ballerinas by the Italian born British sculptor Enzo Plazzotta (1921-1981) - which heated up my fevered boyish imagination. We also had a charming collection of Italian Capodimonte figurines featuring bright, happy, and carefree peasants. My favourite Capodimonte figurine was of a French looking artist at the turn of the century - painting out of doors with easel, canvas, pallet, brushes and even Beret and goatee. I adored it. However, one night my mother while stark raving mad about my persistent and wilful compulsion to paint rather than study – smashed the little artist up on the ground in front of me. I was about eleven, but if anything, her actions only made me more determined to continue painting. I have a few of these art works now. My mum had to sell or pawn most of them when we were starving.

At about five my father taught me how to draw tanks and planes and put on their insignia - the British Target and the German Cross and Swastika. I would watch with envy as my father did his Paintings by Number canvas boards every Christmas. My father and mother first brought me to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin when I was about five.
The second introduction to art I got was through my father’s art encyclopaedia ‘History of Art’ (Editor Claude Schaeffner) Heron Books 1968. Which I first remember flicking through when I was about five - I was mesmerized and thrilled by Hans Memling, Mathis Grünewald and Hieronymus Bosch - as a young boy I was as shocked by their horrors, hells, and anguish - as by any horror-flick in later life. In 27 volumes, History of Art covered painting from the caves of Lascaux and Altamira to the Abstract art of Pollock and everything in between. However, my collection only went up to Surrealism because my dad died before the collection was completed.
Each volume had an introduction, then a main text, then evidence and documents, principal exhibitions, the principal pictorial movements, chronology, museums, and finally and best of all a dictionary of painters (including their short personal history and descriptions and dates of their best works.) This wonderful encyclopaedia on art - written by charming and eloquent French authors – was my constant companion since the age of seven. One of the most touching aspects of these books for me was the short artist biographies at the back. Looking through them I was astonished by just how many artists there had been - how we knew so much about them – and how so many had suffered to pursue their art. In my darkest hours as a child I dreamed that one day - I would be in such a lovely book on art.
             
Painters like Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Hals, Goya, David, Géricault, Ingres, Delacroix, and Degas - were like Gods to me. I knew I could live a hundred lifetimes and still not reach their pictorial genius. However, I would have given my left arm to have a tenth of their ability. Their art utterly inspired me - and it was by their standards that I judged every other artwork. These many artists formed the pillars of my temple to art.

Isolated, alone, and bewildered - I craved views of the world - greater than the sum of my small life. My eyes feasted upon masterpiece after masterpiece - each work broadening my understanding of life and increasing my wonder that such men could speak so directly from the grave. These dead white male geniuses became father figures for me - teaching me and challenging me. In their sorrows and joys - I felt understood and forgiven - I felt part of humanity. 
               
Art became a substitute religion to me. The permanency of art seemed to cheat death and the posthumous rediscovery of the likes of van Gogh seemed to offer me hope in my caged social exclusion and silenced shame and hurt. My faith in art to cheat death - was finally shattered when I was nineteen and I began to compulsively read Existential philosophers like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidegger - and novelists like the Marquis de Sade, Kafka, Genet and Camus. Which combined with a suffocating depression - plunged me into nihilistic and suicidal despair. I had stopped believing in God at about the age of eleven when my thousandth tearful prayer had gone answered. God was my first big rejection. However, it was only when I started reading Existential philosophy that I understood what the implications of a world without God really meant. If there was no God - then my life was essentially meaningless. I would live a pointless and absurd life, die, rot in my grave and even the paintings I painted would decay to nothing. So, what was the point of going on, why kill time when I could just kill myself? If God was dead, then in cosmic terms as the Marquis de Sade pointed out - there was no difference between living a life of sin or a life of Chastity. Furthermore, if God was dead then art was a human joke! It was when I made this realization that I started signing my canvases 'Cypher' and began my Expressive cataclysm.

Only after my mother’s death, did I return to a hope in God and began to pray again. I could not bear to think my mother was really gone forever. These days I am agnostic on the nature of God or the afterlife. I think there are just some things I will never understand. Therefore, I continued to make my art in the sly hope of immortality.
My local library provided me with my third introduction to the world of art. Like many a crass amateur I read 'How-To' types of art books to learn how to draw and paint. These How-To manuals, encouraged me in my crazy ambition to become an artist, set me challenges to complete and gave me a sense of brotherhood. Such authors like; Charles Read who painted messy splashy watercolours (including his books, Painting What you Want to See and Figure Painting in Watercolour) J.M. Parramon (The Complete Book of Oil Painting and The Complete Book of Drawing), David A. Leffel (Oil Painting Secrets From a Master) who painted in a kitsch manner influenced by Rembrandt and Chardin and Gregg Kreutz his pupil (Problem Solving for Oil Painters) - all instilled in me a very conservative love for watercolour, drawing and realist painting.
 
They taught me the differences between artist quality paints (high pigment content) and poor student quality paints (mostly just filler), the value of expensive and highly durable French, Italian and English watercolour papers and the extreme durability of French linen and Mahogany board. Often these books featured the most technically accomplished old-masterish, realist, super-realist and photo-realist watercolour and oil painters. Like a child, I wondered at the hyperrealism of their work and the intricate nature of their technique. I also noticed that these new-age academics always used expensive and super durable supports like Arches 300lb (640gsm) watercolour paper and French linen. Therefore, I vowed that I too would make work as durable!
On TV, I avidly watched Keating on Painting on Channel 4. In this series of programs - Tom Keating who was the most famous English forger of the twentieth century - taught his viewers how to paint like Titian, Constable, Manet, Monet or Renoir. I adored his programs during which he chain-smoked and revealed the secret techniques of the old masters. He was by far and away the most technically accomplished and charismatic art teacher I have ever seen on television. A cockney from a poor family, he had tried to make a career for himself as a painter but had had little success. In revenge, he was known to have made fakes of work by Samuel Palmer and various European masters including Francois Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Thomas Gainsborough, Amedeo Modigliani, Rembrandt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Kees van Dongen. He claimed that he had produced over 2,000 fakes in his lifetime. He was finally arrested in 1977, but the case was dropped because of his poor health. As a young teenager, one of my greatest ambitions saw to be a painting teacher on television like Tom Keating or in books like David A. Leffel. I still get nostalgic when looking through these kinds of books for enthusiastic amateurs - the same feelings I have when reading old comics.
 
Picasso for me in my teenage years was the yards stick by which to plan my own development. I adored his Cubist collages, Surrealist distortions, and his joyful doodles of later years. I loved his cheek in taking a bicycle seat and handlebars and making them into a bull’s head, by means of one witty weld. Despite the fact that I wanted to one day make such audaciously simple technical works - I firmly believed I had to earn the right to do so - just as he had – by drilling myself first in the rigors of academic, naturalistic and realist drawing and painting.
From the age of ten until the age of sixteen, I strove to become a classical painter in the mode of Ingres. However, as I mastered my technique, I felt my inner turmoil bubbled up to such an extent I could not hold it back any longer. The production of manicured classical images became more and more difficult for me as I fought against my psychological character – trying to control and manage my images. I made the decision that I had to make art that embodied my emotional turmoil – and were true to my condition.
One crass Modernist lie about American art I was tricked into believing in my late teens was that there was no great art in America before Jackson Pollock - which was brilliantly exposed by Robert Hughes in his epic on American art – American Visions (1997.) Pollock was a genius - a Promethean creative force equal in a sprint with Picasso (the trouble was - after 100m Pollock ran out of steam - while Picasso kept on running) but to suggest that he was the first or only American genius is ignorant and all too typical of the stupidity of Art College students these days. The oeuvres of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper in oils, watercolours, charcoal, or pencil were for me simply sublime - and the equal of better-known Frenchmen like Renoir.
In 2002, I underwent a terrible identity crisis, I felt I my art had gone into a cul-de-sac. My self-belief and vision deserted me after my exhibitions in the Oisín Gallery - and I was torn between the desire to continue to paint my transgressive images - and create saleable works that the public would like. So in a backward phase, I retreated to those artists I had first admired before becoming ‘Cypher’ and ‘The Panic Artist’. Alienated by the intellectual and symbolic mystifications of contemporary art, my reading material mirrored my conservative retreat as I devoured every art review I could find by Robert Hughes and Brian Sewell. I largely abandoned my Expressionist ethos and tried to retrain myself. 

On Friday 2ed April 2004, I bought 1900: Art at the Crossroads the catalogue to an exhibition of the kind of Salon Art that was triumphant at the turn of the century before the ascendancy of Modernism. In many ways, 1900: Art at the Crossroads was one of the most important books I had ever bought, because it made me question the logic and authority of Modernist art history and whether I should even try to obey the current dogmas and fads of my time. 1900: Art at the Crossroads highlighted a period in art when Naturalism spiced up with a bit of Impressionism was triumphant even though its proponents would later be expunged from Art History. It was such a dominate style that in the exhibition, we even saw later pioneers of early Abstraction like František Kupka produce early skilled Naturalistic efforts. At the turn of the Twentieth Century most of the educated art public preferred the academic skills, comforting clichés, Nationalism, pretty and docile female nudes, and soft-core porn of the Salon artists to the ugly, difficult, and politically suspect works of the early Modernists. World-famous society portrait painters like John Singer Sargent, Giovanni Boldini, Joaquín Sorolla, and Anders Zorn with their flashy virtuoso canvases commanded prices the early avant-garde rebels could only dream of. Though in 1910, Walter Sickert damned them as the ‘Wiggle-and-Chiffon School’. These portrait painters alongside Salon history painters like Hans Makart, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema who served up cinematic spectacles in oil paint, were briefly the most famous painters in art history because of the advent of photography, newspapers, periodicals, prints, and touring exhibitions - which spread their fame far and wide. 1900: Art at the Crossroads was panned by many narrow-minded and dogmatic art critics at the time like Hilton Kramer and Michael Kimmelman who could not see the point of exhibiting the losers of art history. And Hilton Kramer in particular thought the exhibition was an insult to the heroes of Modernism and their advocates who had fought so hard to overcome such academic kitsch. But 1900: Art at the Crossroads provoked one of my favourite art reviews by Robert Hughes, who pointed out that while most of the work of these artists were dated, historically redundant, and even absurd, they had received a rigorous technical training beyond the abilities of most contemporary art students and could draw and paint far better than any of the incompetent art stars of our day. Finally, Hughes saw the exhibition of these feted art stars of the 1900s who were mostly now forgotten - as a warning to all the puffed-up art stars of 2000 – most of whom would also be forgotten within a hundred years.

Between 2002-2007, I was increasingly attracted to the work of the great Belle Epoch painters like John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, Antonio Mancini, Giovani Boldini, Anders Zorn, Il'Ya Repin, Ignacio Zuloaga, Augustus John, Sir John Lavery and William Orpen. 

Portrait painters like Sargent, Sorolla, Mancini, and Boldini painted the faces and hands of their sitters with great technical skill and a high degree of finish - but their clothes and surroundings with bravura sketchiness and apparent impulsiveness. In fact, if one looks at a close-up of a satin dress painted by Sargent or Zorn one might mistake their flowing gestural brushstrokes for early Abstract-Expressionist paintings! And the way a woman’s dress and in fact the whole room around her in a Boldini is suggested with lacerating, dynamic brushstrokes could make one think of Futurist canvases or even the gestural abstract paintings of Hans Hartung decades later. Finally, looking at the idiosyncratic way Mancini rendered faces and hands in a conventionally academic way but painted the backgrounds, clothing, and surrounding details with intense accumulations of impastoed paint, as much as half or three quarters of an inch thick, which he sometimes mixed with paper, foil or glass, one could easily be reminded of mid-career Jackson Pollock in a painting like Full Fathom Five from 1947, or even later society portraits in oil paint on broken plates mounted on boards by Julian Schnabel at the end of the twentieth century. 
Despite the apparently casual and spontaneous look of their portraits, the Belle Epoch painters work was in fact highly skilled and calculated. Like many virtuosos, they knew there was nothing more exciting to the public than an artist making the extremely difficult look like child’s play. They believed that their first brushstroke was the most important and was the sincerest, so they were loath to make corrections. But their apparent directness was built upon years of academic training in drawing and painting from life, and their canvases were carefully planned. As such their work combined the skills of academia with a dash of avant-garde style, but they often only succeeded in angering both the conservatives who thought they were too casual, slick, and superficial and the rebels who thought they were too commercial and reactionary. However, they were adored by the rich all over Europe and America because of the glamour they imparted on their sitters. 

The Belle Epoch roughly stretched from 1885 to its bloody end in 1914. The First World War marked the death knell of the Aristocracy in Europe. Monarchies collapsed all over Europe, the Czar his family were shot dead in Russia or in England lived to witness their power, influence and wealth deteriorate decade by decade. Similarly, a war was fought between modernism (the likes of Monet, Matisse, Klimt, Picasso, and Kandinsky) and the Belle Epoch painters of privilege, and the Aristocratic lackeys were strung up. Nevertheless, I found Belle Epoch painting delightful because of its marriage of traditional tonal painting with the bravura brushstrokes of Velázquez and the fresh colour of Monet. So, brushwork became a pet subject of mine to study and practice in my own art from 2007-2014 and I became fascinated with developing lush, beautiful brushwork at the expense of nearly any other quality like subject matter or concept. 

Unlike the truculent and rebellious painters of Post-Impressionism like Paul Gaugain and Vincent Van Gogh, whose achievements came through perseverance, hard work and sacrifice, the master virtuosos of the Belle Epoch, were either child prodigies or students who thrived in the academic system and went on to have privileged and largely trouble free careers. The Belle Epoch painters were the last in a long line of Aristocratic painting stretching back to Velázquez and Frans Hals. The skills these painters possessed, were lost by the Second World War. The atelier training in tonal paintings and exacting life drawing with charcoal was lost forever, thus a chain of tradition was severed. The secrets and tips of this art, passed down from master to master, were gone. Portrait painting after the First World War was a story of clumsy self-taught painters making uglier and uglier representations of the face. One would be forgiven to think the sitters of Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, Philip Pearlstein, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Odd Nerdrum or Jenny Saville were suffering from third degree burns or some hideous form of skin disease - very different from the flattering glamour and beauty of a Belle Epoch Duchesses in a lush directly painted Sargent oil painting.

Moreover, the painters who sat at this Belle Epoch court were the last to know what was required of an old master – reserve, dignity, poise, discipline, manners, and gentility- the same virtuous painters at court had needed since Da Vinci's and Raphael's day. That is why I and I think many in the art world are slightly disgusted by the recent art of the likes of Odd Nerdrum, he may possess the technical skills of an old master, but he has none of their psychological health, forward thinking, modernity, and dignity.

The Belle Epoch masters painted their bravura paintings fast and with flashy skills, that turned the sumptuous application of paint into a virtuoso performance, which both flattered the sitter and elevated the painter to the level of a maestro. Considering the quality and finish of their paintings they were prolific and worked with amazing directness. They had very successful careers, becoming compared with the old masters like Velázquez, became wealthy and part of the aristocratic élite they painted.
Their work has since been dismissed by the avant-garde, the Marxists who deplored their flattering of the elite and the worse still they became irrelevant to contemporary painters who never had the required training to paint in such a manner and were taught that the Belle Epoch was made acharonistic by Modernism. Yet, for the general public, they remain beloved in much the same way that working class people - who left-wing people think should know better - love the monarchy and its aspirational world of luxury and tradition. They are still particularly popular amongst amateur painters and frequently sited in how-to-paint books aimed at the Sunday painter.
            
Between 2002-2007, I felt my art had been seriously handicaped by my lack of technical training in drawing and painting. I would have given my eyeteeth for the training the likes of Sargent, Orpen and John had acquired. That is why in 2003-4, I returned to taking night classes in NCAD However, while these classes did help resharpen my skills, I realized that it was impossible to remove from my paintings the acquired mannerisms of a lifetime’s worth of clumsy, unsystematic, self-teaching.
 
One of my favourite minor painters of the Belle Epoch period who I had loved since my late twenties was Augustus John - one of the finest draughtsmen in history. His drawings in charcoal, pencil, black chalk, ink, and etching were wonderfully varied. There was incredible energy and directness in his drawings. This was real drawing, from life, directly and under a time limit. Some of his drawings of his wife Dorelie in a long dress had a timeless Renaissance quality. The faster he drew - the better he drew. Yet on the other hand, in obsessively shaded pencil drawings of friends and family he was the last old master of the hatched drawing. Sadly, his skill in drawing prevented him ever becoming a great painter - frequently in his paintings he was happy just to fill in the lines - leaving the pencil marks still showing underneath. Yet occasionally, he managed to pull-off small masterpieces in paint - particularly of his lovers and children - that had a freshness and lack of correction that was wonderful in it apparent simplicity.
              
My other great passion was John Singer Sargent. I had loved his work since I was fifteen. Sargent’s technique was stunning in its virtuosity - yet his vision remained superficial and uncritical. He was too happy to merely flatteringly record the appearance of things, to glamorise and idealise, rather than penetrate the surface of social reality. As such, his paintings lacked the psychological depth or humanity of his heroes Hals, Rembrandt, or Velázquez. Nevertheless, as a joyful and sensual celebration of the beauty of life it had no equal. That Sargent was a repressed homosexual was apparent when one looked at his smouldering charcoal drawings of male nudes. However, it was his gorgeous oil paintings of society women and his spontaneous watercolours of Venice and other landscape and architectural motifs - which were my favourites. Looking at his buttery bravura brushstrokes in his oils and his darting wet colourful strokes in his watercolours I was struck dumb with wonder and professional envy and as an art lover I was consumed with a lust for possession.
As a young artist, I had been attracted to the extremes of Modern art, yet during my conservative retreat, I turn against much of the art that had previously excited me. I became a tortured and two-faced artist, in love with tradition, yet at the same time in love with shock and transgression. My late attacks on some of the extremes of Modern art, were hypocritical, since although I painted pictures, my content had frequently been transgressive and my attitude brutish. Moreover, my inability reconcile these opposing positions only served to mentally torture myself. 
This phase of my work would only come to an end in 2008 when I abandoned my attempts to please others (which had not succeed anyway) and to return to my Expressionist art of protest. I began to place content ahead of technique again and try to paint in as contemporary a manner as I could. However, I firmly believe that the retraining and retrenching I did between 2002-2007 - helped me in all my later work.