Showing posts with label Dublin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dublin. Show all posts

31/01/2017

Ten Leonardo da Vinci Drawings at The National Gallery of Ireland

On Thursday 9th June 2016, Carol and I went into the National Gallery of Ireland to see ten drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from the British Royal Collection. Dublin was bathed in the golden light of dusk in late spring and the women on the streets seemed to glow with fecundity though none more so than a beautiful, slender, auburn haired, golden tanned, pregnant woman in a bright pale blue sun dress and with flip-flops - I saw passing outside the National Gallery.                                                                                                      
                        
I had not ventured out to see an exhibition in about four months and I was frankly sick to death of contemporary art and saw no point in frustrating and angering myself anymore with the trivial, commercial and eager to please crap of my peers and wondered why anyone still wanted to make or write about art. Art for me had ended in 1985 when Neo-Expressionism stopped being the major movement of the day and Neo-Geo took its place. I simply did not give a dam about the zillions of pastiches and rehashes of style done with such a waste of materials and human energy since 1985 and whose only merit was commercial, moralistic or as the embodiment of identity politics. I could not identify with an art world that had turned from an arena of truthful, personal, freedom of expression - regardless of the personal cost - into a gilded cage populated by extreme left-wing and Feminist moralisers who schizophrenically also hung around art galleries and private member’s clubs trying to sell their art to corporate billionaires. I was now just a highly informed philistine and carried on with my own art because it was the only thing that kept me sane. Moreover, as a middle-aged artist, I had long since stopped being influenced by other artists and had come to realise that no one could help me in the midst of my painting - than myself. In fact, I had to think hard to think of the last exhibition that had actually inspired or aided my own work. But I really would have a been a philistine - if I had passed up the opportunity to see drawings by da Vinci! And as it turned out, this was to be one of the most inspiring exhibitions I had seen in a long time.                                            


I had glanced at the drawings on the National Gallery website and was struck by how introverted and lacking in bravura flashiness they were but I hoped that in the flesh they would have more impact. Seeing them in the dimly lit gallery space was thus a revelation. Da Vinci’s drawing were on thin sheets of paper mostly no bigger than postcards and I had to peer to see all their details. What I saw in the flesh was a grandeur of vision on a small scale - I had never witnessed in any other artist. Only Dürer came close to da Vinci’s power as a draughtsman on a small scale. The paper da Vinci used was made of cotton rag, hot pressed and no more than 90lb in weight. The paper was so thin that one could see the marks from the verso of the sheets - which he frequently made use of on both sides. Those sheets that had drawings on both sides were exhibited in double sided glass frames which one could walk around. The exhibition started with a short and succinct video demonstrating the materials and techniques of da Vinci the draughtsman. As you know, I loathe video pieces of any kind in exhibitions, but as a technical geek, I found it highly informative and loved hearing about the materials da Vinci used.                                     
                           

You know one of the reasons, I got an E in my first ever essay on art in Art College at the age of eighteen, was because it was on Picasso’s Les Demoiselle d’Avignon and since I had never seen it in the flesh - I found it almost impossible to write about. I still haven’t seen Les Demoiselle d’Avignon and I still don’t feel fit to write about it. I was nineteen then and even now at forty-five - I find it as hard to write about art works I have never seen. Seeing da Vinci’s drawings in low resolution JPGs on the National Gallery website gave me little idea of the material quality of the drawings in the flesh. Even when I went home and looked at the drawings in high resolution photographs in various books on da Vinci at home - I found the experience strangely detached. But in the gallery, where I had to navigate other viewers, peer into the glass frames under dim light and strain to see all the fine details of da Vinci’s line - it was a full erotic experience.                                                                              
                                                      
The last time I had a chance to see da Vinci drawings was in 2007, in the Chester Betty Gallery, but I had come away from that very frustrated and disappointed. The Codex Leicester, actually contained no standalone drawings, and those on the margins of The Codex Leicester were restricted to water and engineering - a subject I had no interest in and even if I did, I did not speak Latin and did not have a mirror to reverse da Vinci’s famously reversed writing. So it was a relief to finally see drawings of real impact in this exhibition. The ten drawings captured some of da Vinci’s chief interests, a female portrait with da Vinci’s much copied enigmatic and benign smile, a study of blackberry bush, study of river water damage on an embankment, studies for horses, studies of cats and one drawing of from a series of ten about a deluge which reflected da Vinci’s pessimistic fascination with the end of the world. There was nothing narcissistically flashy or extravagant about these drawings. In fact, they seemed incredibly private and introverted works made for da Vinci’s own pleasure and understanding. They convinced slowly and devastatingly.                                                                                                                                  

The great criticism of da Vinci, was that he had so many ideas - but realised too few of his projects. That is of course true, which is why it is his drawings that are arguably his greatest achievement, because it is in them that we witness his encyclopaedic interest in the natural world and plans for his many inventions. Today, these are prized almost as conceptual statements worthy in their own right - irrespective of whether or not he actually ever carried them to fulfilment - and in fact a sketch by da Vinci is often more important and profound than whole frescoed rooms by his technically skilled and hardworking but dim witted peers. Not only was da Vinci an incomparable genius at the start of the Renaissance - he was a genius with an open arena to play in - and you can see the pleasure and intensity of experience he brought to all his studies. He was like Columbus discovering America - or more recently Steve Jobs at the start of the personal computer age – with limitless room for discovery and an unassailable right to call himself the first and best - before many. Moreover, da Vinci’s omnivorous intellect and knowledge meant that everything he drew no matter how humble - was freighted with such an intensity of scrutiny and understanding - that he could make even a few branches from a blackberry bush seem epic in import.                                                            


The last great artist to bring such fresh intensity to the sketchbook from life, was the teenage Pablo Picasso in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, even though I have always considered drawing from life a vital part of one’s training, I have always had my doubts about the practice of students today being told to go out into nature and the city - to draw life - because so much of our real lives today are experienced through mediated images - that drawing from nature and physical human life - is actually unnatural and a hopelessly nostalgic, escapist fantasy. Scurrying out on expeditions into the real world - to do drawings from life today - is about as cliché, retrograde and mendacious as the nature poems of ‘poets’ living in tower blocks surrounded by digital screens, listening to Beethoven on their iPhones. In this Post-Modern world, real life only happens - when there is a power cut – and we don’t enjoy it!                             


Unlike like so many artists since the invention of photography and the cult of Impressionism, da Vinci’s drawings, did not superficially record the fall of light on bodies or objects – instead they recorded both the inner and outer structure of forms - and tried to find the source of their life. His vision of the body and nature was thus not of the fleeting and subjective but rather of the timeless and ordered. Moreover, da Vinci’s drawings proved that not only was he a great draughtsman working from life - but even more importantly - he was a great draughtsman working from his memory and imagination. Take for example his sheet of drawings of cats which are all perfectly realised in all kinds of rest, motion and fight. I have drawn periodically my cats and know that even when asleep they rarely stay still! So to draw them from life when they are resting is difficult enough - but almost impossible when moving. So da Vinci’s drawings of cats were as much about his almost photographic memory and knowledge of their anatomy as mere observation. Likewise, in the final drawing of a deluge, we see da Vinci’s knowledge and imagination create an image beyond mere appearances that may have been incorrect in minor details but overall - was epic in it cataclysmic vision of nature.                                                                                                          

For me da Vinci is the greatest draughtsman in art history because of the vastness of his range and subject matter - with only Dürer coming close to him. He continues to be an influence on young artists and Jean Michel Basquait for example was obsessed with reworking, blowing up and roughing up da Vinci’s drawings - particularly those related to anatomy. Da Vinci’s humble drawings for me were like a blessed liberation from the tyranny of the Post-Modern Neo-Salon artists of today like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and countless other rich nobodies who try to cow their peers with vast projects executed by teams of hired underlings, skilful failed artists, technicians and factory workers. You could frankly pile up all the tonnes of ‘art’ produced by most of these Post-Modern, Neo-Salon Robber Barons and it would not mean a fraction of what a tiny, feather weight drawing by da Vinci means - not only to me - but to Art History. That is why da Vinci is so inspiring - he offers no excuses to the young artist. So you can’t afford to hire thirty lackey painters to paint vast oil on linen photo-realist confections or fifty foundry workers to take a toy you found in a Poundshop and turn it into a ten-ton bronze? So you can’t even afford a small canvas and oil paint? Surely you can afford a sheet of paper and a stick of black chalk? Let’s see what you can do with that! And if you do paint - just paint twelve small and medium sized - timeless masterpieces!

15/03/2014

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at IMMA



On Saturday 30th April 2011, Carol and I made a trip out to IMMA to see an exhibition of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. It was a hot day oppressive day with little wind, the galleries were crammed with tourists and there was not air conditioning in the galleries.  Carol was almost in tears as she viewed her heroines canvases. I had come with a sceptical mind, but even I had to admit Kahlo’s brilliance and originality. Her canvases and drawings had a rare almost crazy intensity. Rivera in comparison was a shocking let down. His paintings were weak and facile in comparison to his famous partner, but then his best work had been his murals in Mexico, so I had to give him the benefit of the doubt.                                                   
  
The fate of Diego River’s socialist art and Freda Khalo’s autobiographical art mirrored the changes in society, where political life had become dubious and the personal had become both political and fetishized. We could no more understand River’s political idealism today than his time could appreciate Khalo’s self-involvement.                                                                                         

After looking around twice at the Kahlo and Rivera exhibition, we went over to the main galleries. In the ground floor galleries, I was surprised and delighted by Romuald Hazoumè’s exhibition of found petrol cans that he had slightly altered to look like African masks, his semi-abstract acrylic paintings mixed with mud and dung, his evocative black and white photographs of Benin men festooned with petrol cans and his sculptures made of found petrol cans.        

It was amazing to see how much one could achieve with humble materials and a bit of imagination. We loved Romuald Hazoumè’s work so much we bought the catalogue.                                                                                                                       

Then we went upstairs to see a huge collection of Old Master prints from the Madden Arnholz collection. The galleries were darkly lit, hot and stuff and I felt tired so it was hard to concentrate on these small black and white etchings, though I did linger over some gems by Rembrandt, Dürer, Goya and Honoré Daumier.                                                                            

                                                                
Finally, we saw Anima Mundi a showcase of Philip Taaffe paintings from the last ten years. For decades I had seen his exhibitions around the world mentioned in art magazines and seen reproductions of his work. I had never thought much of him, but had held off judging his work until I saw it in the flesh. When I did, I was disgusted by such a successful and rich artist without an ounce of passion or talent. He took the art of textiles and made it even more mechanical and soulless. The huge canvases echoed again, male artists’ egotistical desire to overwhelm their viewers and cow them into credulity. Perhaps such huge pattered art would have looked funky in a bank but in a museum, it looked empty and pointless.

A Dublin Gallery Crawl 2011


On Tuesday 19th April 2011, I went into town with Carol for a jaunt around the art galleries - and to buy art materials in M. Kennedy & Sons. In the Green on Red, we saw Autodidactic by Ronan McCrea a stupid exhibition of photographs of children playing in a car park with coloured lines photo-shopped around them. In the Douglas Hyde gallery, we saw an exhibition of Shiva Linga paintings by anonymous artists from Rajasthan in north-western India, which looked good from a distance, but were disappointingly amateurish and repetitive when seen close up.                                                                                    
        
In the Kerlin gallery, we saw Notes on 14 Paintings, a beautiful and powerful new exhibition by Brian Maguire that was better than most of the art I had seen in Chelsea months before. I was thankful that there was still expressive painters like Maguire making vivid new work.                                                          


In the Rubicon gallery, we saw Tondos & Bi-Products a charming exhibition of abstract paintings by Alexis Harding. Harding had graduated from Goldsmiths Art College in 1995, and spent the following years exploring abstract grid patterns which he then distressed. He painted his abstracts in gloss paint - flat on the ground. Then when the paint skin had dried, he would hang the paint skins allowing gravity to pull them down and often apart – warping and buckling the grids he had created. This exhibition contained a couple of these large and thoughtful abstracts, but it also had a series of quick abstract oil sketches on the cardboard covers of one of his previous exhibition catalogues - in which he experimented with shape, colour and the material of paint. I had always had a disproportionate affection for such painterly exercises in process and form.  Not out of any desire to emulate such a narrow application of the art of painting - but rather for the possibilities such specialists opened up to other painters. Carol and I loved the show, so we bought two of Harding’s catalogues. Then we walked through St. Stephen’s Green before going to Kennedy’s and buying paints and paper.

14/03/2014

Eoin McHugh At The Douglas Hyde Gallery


On Monday 19th August 2013, Carol and I went into town so I could get some art supplies. Having not had much new to read for a while - I felt the need to buy some new art books. So I had a look around the National Gallery bookshop and then Hodges Figgis and bought books on Modigliani and Egon Schiele’s landscapes. Then we walked through St. Stephens Green and up to Kennedy’s art shop where I bought 12 sticks of Schmincke soft pastels (my favourite chalk pastels) and a six tube box of Winsor & Newton Alkyd paints. On our way back we had Mochas, sandwiches and cakes in Starbucks.                 

Before heading home we dropped into the Douglas Hyde gallery. I stomach clenched as we approached the entrance, expecting yet another pretentious exhibition appealing only to those with PHD’s in philosophy or conceptual art. So often exhibitions in the Douglas Hyde were like cynical brain teasers designed to make you look like an idiot and the artist an unfathomable genius, and I had grown sick and tired of such dances of the seven veils. However, I was delighted to discover the work of Eoin McHugh (who I had never heard of) was masterful, bewitching and engagingly conceptual. The first work on the first floor was a pond lined with branches and populated by a beakless duck, another with a motorboat for a body and a clutch of chicks. It was superbly made and very convincing and its craftsmanship and surreal play reminded me of the Chapman brothers. I could not remember the last time I had seen work of this quality and broad appeal in the Douglas Hyde. Born in 1977, McHugh was an ex pupil of NCAD and exhibited with the Kerlin gallery - the premier commercial Dublin art gallery. McHugh was a skilled painter in oils and watercolour, a surreal sculptor of real talent and a conceptual collector of objects that he really made speak to the viewer. There were obviously many layers to McHugh’s work and the overall technical quality of the work made me want to unravel some of them. McHugh’s images at first glance appeared normal even illustrative, however one was quickly made uneasy by the sight of birds without eyes or frightening melanges of bird’s wings than reminded me of things I had seen during bad acid trips. His sculptures took this biomorphic distortion further, so that parts of his sculptures reminded me of human torsos, other parts bones, animal limbs and yet others branches and yet others insect legs. Yet the overall execution was so seamless that all these elements flowed freely between each other. Also interspersed in the exhibition were found objects; a wooden model destroyer covered in barnacles, a wooden tall ship with its sail burnt, a book with parts of it cut out to hold bones, a headless hedgehog and many other evocative things that actually did rhyme with the forms and ideas in the paintings, watercolours and sculptures in a genuinely interesting way. Carol said McHugh was depressingly brilliant, and I knew she meant it as a compliment. However, though he was six years younger than me, I did not find McHugh’s talent depressing or anger inducing like mediocre art so often was – I found his work inspiring. It was clear from the number of visitors to the exhibition, the time they spent looking at the art works and their giddy buzz that we were not alone in rating McHugh’s work.              

Also in the Douglas Hyde was a small exhibition of oil on paper and cardboard paintings by the folk artist Frank Walter whose work could hardly be more different from McHugh’s but was just as good in its own way. Walter’s work had a naïve simplicity, directness and unintentional humour that was refreshing. Walter’s drawing was naïve and he seemed to have a simple technique for different visual phenomena - like sponging for the effect of leaves on a tree or use of a scrapper for the effect of waves. Some of his work - like an image of a man being swallowed by a whale - made me laugh in a good hearted way with its childlike conception. When I read that Walter had written a 25,000 page autobiography, I joked to Carol that I had better get writing! I thanked Carol for suggesting we visit the Douglas Hyde!  


In the days, and months that passed, I thought again and again about Eoin McHugh and Frank Walter’s exhibitions. While I could still vividly recall many of Walter’s paintings on paper, McHugh’s work left only a vague impression. I recalled something similar had happened when I had seen many of the nineteenth century academic Salon painters in the Met in New York. While I had marvelled at the labour and skill that had gone into the likes of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s paintings – they had left no lasting impression on me. With Salon painting like Gérôme’s you spend more time being impressed by the technical skill and labour put into the work - than actually feeling anything about what is being conveyed. It’s the kind of skill that never lets you forget it is skilful - to such an extent you feel nothing. This left me musing about that certain something which we call soul or spirit or character in art that is essential to a true masterpiece - no matter how much work and dazzling skill was deployed. Conversely, often works of little apparent skill or labour like Frank Walter’s can sweep us off our feet through their intensity, soulfulness or visual catchiness.