Patrick Graham Half Light at Hillsboro Fine Art

On Thursday 24^th October 2013, Carol and I went in to own to see the opening of Half Light a new exhibition of paintings and mixed media collages by Patrick Graham at Hillsboro Fine Art. Apart from Carol’s openings, it was the first opening we had gone to in years, and I was frankly nervous about being in public again, but I was such a fan of Graham’s work I could not miss it. Also, I was feeling at such a low about my own art I hoped to get some inspiration from the seventy year olds canvases. Before going into the exhibition we had a meal at KFC which I enjoyed more than any meal in a fancy restaurant.                

Graham’s exhibition consisted of three large diptychs in oils called Half Light and eight mixed media collages called the Lamb Series. Honestly, I was a bit disappointed by them - feeling they added little to Graham’s oeuvre. There was little to grab hold of in these new works by Graham. Apparently Half Light was an attempt to capture the spirit of the sea in Co. Mayo without resorting to direct representational imagery. For example Half Light III was basically nothing more than two grey canvases scrapped down a few times and eventually finished off with fat horizontal brushstrokes in clotted and ugly oil paint, and it had taken Graham over two years to paint. That such a minimal and to my mind still unsatisfactory work could have taken Graham two years was incredible. These minimal works simply did not inspire me with the kind of confident belief in Graham that for example the late works of Rothko did.                                                                                                                                                     

On the other hand, Graham had always built up his paintings through a constant process of painting and scraping down - to arrive at a final eloquent statement - it was just that these works paired down the recognisable imagery to an extreme I had not seen before in his work. Graham’s stripping down of the expressionist excesses of his previous work - to speak of the silence of air - seemed to be appropriate after the end of the era of decadent excess of the Celtic Tiger and the new age of austerity, condemnation and puritan self-examination. In reducing his painting to its barest expression, I felt Graham had at least caught the mood of the times where all of us were left questioning what was really important and what was merely spectacle. So I found these paintings haunt my imagination more than I had thought they would.                                                                                                                           

The mixed media collages that formed The Lamb Series, I found were similarly vague and disjointed, though they did have little sparks of figurative genius. They seemed to battle again with the themes of; the temptation of the flesh, artistic pride and an absent God, which had previously cropped up in Graham’s work. However, I wondered if Graham’s famous reaction against his early facility and illustrational modes had in these works left the viewer with little to admire. Perhaps, they did avoid obvious Expressionist theatrics and left the viewer something to muse about, however I was underwhelmed. I also noticed that this doubt about the veracity of traditional representation, led Graham to mangle form in a sadomasochistic way. Seen in reproduction, these works were even more inscrutable, so I was glad to have seen them in person. Thinking again about them, I wondered if they should have been called The Dying of the Light – a series of final repudiations of the world. I spent €10 on the exhibition catalogue, which I discovered had a very revealing interview with Graham; however the quality of the reproductions was awful.                                                                                                                                


I wanted to go up to Patrick Graham and wish him all the best, but could not summon up the courage to talk to my hero - besides I was unsure what I could say about his new work. While at the opening we met up with Rob and had a few glasses of wine. Surrounded by arty and rich people, I began to feel panicked and depressed. I felt very uncomfortable at the show, and we decided to leave early. We went for a pint in Jury’s Inn, which I need to calm my nerves. Rob drove us home and had a couple of coffees at our house which I enjoyed.                

A Tour of Dublin Galleries 2013

We went into town to doing a mini tour of the galleries. First we went to the RHA Gallery were we saw an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Seán Keating an artist for whom I had long harboured a dislike because of his obnoxious mix of Irish nationalism/provincialism, reactionary aesthetics and dictatorial approach in the National College of Art. Keating was industrious and possessed above average skills, yet his work utterly lacked humanity or imagination and addressed the viewer with the kind of pompousness typical of nationalist propaganda. Yet, even I had to grudgingly admire some of his watercolours and oils of ESB engineering constructions at Ardnacrusha and Poulaphouca, even if they reminded me of far more daring, original and heartfelt work by the likes of Kokoschka.        

                       

An instillation of Michael Warren consisting of eight wooden folding chairs hung flat and vertically on the wall, each with minor alterations to the angle of the back slats, was cleaver but pointless and the comparison with the work of Piero della Francesca an utter cheek. A series of pretentious technical drawings, by Julie Merriman was worse still for its cleaver conceit of a sheet of paper with one drawing and tracing paper with another drawing laid on top. So what, as an idea it was not brought very far and as technical drawings they were crude and adolescent looking to me.                                              

Upstairs we saw the Futures 12 exhibition, which had two painters of quality, one painterly imposter and three ‘sculptors’ without a shred of talent between them. Peter Burn’s crumby paintings left me baffled as yet another manifestation of pseudo-naïve painting in Ireland. When I wondered had it become the ambition of so many young painters in Ireland to paint the most archly dumb paintings possible? Perhaps if Burns had proved himself as a craftsman and artist of significance and then like Philip Guston turned to black humour his rank efforts might have had some meaning.                                    

Jim Ricks’ inflatable Dolman sculpture (a mocking comment on the commercialism of Irish heritage) I found irritating for other reasons. It lacked any subtlety and while a great deal of industry had gone into this gag – I loathed joke art even if it put me out of step with virtually everything presented as iconic art since 1955. Peter Burns and Jim Ricks continued the tradition of joke art that had begun with the Dada artist of the 1920s and since the 1960s had achieved success in an art world sadly aware of its own insignificance in the modern world. Personally I loathed joke art; I thought it was an easy knee-jerk response to the impossible demands of creativity. The artists I truly admired where those who had avoided such defeatist strategies to find new expressive possibilities. Humour becomes dated notoriously fast, and there perhaps is humour to be found in the way naïve art students now revere the feckless urinal of Duchamp or the supposed can of shit of Manzoni. Joke art just doesn’t have the sustained meaning of tragic art. The only humorous art I had ever actually laughed out along with was Martin Kippenberger.      

Lucy Andrews ‘sculptures’ that looked like the most shoddy and incompetent science experiments in a high school left me equally baffled by their lack of technical quality and their cryptic meaning which I could not care less to decipher. Caoimhe Kilfeather’s sculptural installation was even worse than Lucy Andrews’ collection of woe begotten science experiments and I could barely waste a second look on her sculptural shambles.   Later I read that Kilfeather’s lump of lead was supposed to represent a waterfall, though at the time I recognized none of the fury and beauty of such a thing - in that shroud of clumsy lead.                                                                                                                          

On the other hand Stephanie Rowe’s miniature oil paintings on wooden boards of actresses caught in a freeze frame millisecond were technical and luminous masterpieces on a small scale. Though their subjects were modern silver screen actresses and their colours bright and lush – their miniature scale, smooth surfaces and minute sable brushed details were reminiscent of Dutch Golden Age painters like Metsu and Vermeer. Rowe’s use of screen-grabs from movies, illustrated again, how reproductions of reality had come to dominate more and more of our lives and take on part of our dreamscape. They were beautiful, patiently rendered, evocative memorials to screen goddess - many of us had daydreamt about. Rowe’s work proved what modesty, craft and real intensity could achieve.                                                   

Ed Miliano’s vast collection of smaller than A4 paintings on paper laid out on long shelves, initially did not impress me. However the closer and longer I looked the more I became sucked into their visual delight. The paintings of gardens, varied from a kind of early Expressionism to abstraction to a kind of contemporary realism. It was fascinating to observe the daily changes in Ed Miliano’s mood and vision and the different intensities. Seen close up each painting hummed beside its companions, yet looked at en mass a whole new rhythm revealed itself. Although Ed Miliano’s technique was not as stunning as Stephanie Rowe I found his paintings had more gravitas.                                                      

On our way out we briefly stepped in to Gavin Murphy’s twenty minute video On Seeing Only Totally New Things. We caught the video as the camera was fixed on a trendy chair and a male voice over waffled on about design. I had already given this piece a minute of my life and I wasn’t about to waste another nineteen so I walked out. Apparently it was about a modernist building called the IMCO which was built in 1939 and demolished in 1979.                                                                                          

Next we went to the Taylor galleries to view a new exhibition by Pauline Bewick one of the most commercially successful Irish artists due to the popularity of her Celtic brand of illustration which pillaged the images of far greater artists like Picasso and feminized them into mush. Personally I had never given a dam about her work, though I thought it might be fun to see her work in the flesh. They were not worth the trip, Bewick’s works was in fact worse in reality than in reproduction, her drawing flaccid and awkward and her colours utterly uninteresting and forgettable. Even Carol could only praise the ultra expensive handmade paper she used. Yet, Bewick’s show was thronged with school kids, minor celebrities and the prices of her works was truly eye watering. Bewick was yet more proof that nothing succeeds in the short term like charming mediocrity.                                                                                            

Next we went to the Rubicon gallery to see an exhibition of new oil paintings my Nick Miller, whose retrospective in the RHA in 2004 had been one of my favourites. I found these new paintings, which were again landscapes painted from his van a dreadful disappointment. They were under drawn and over painted, with none of the energy of his previous work. He seemed to be going over old ground for no particular reason.                                                                                                                  

Finally we went to the Kerlin gallery to see a new exhibition of oil paintings by Callum Innes. I was no particular fan of geometric abstraction, though when done well by the likes of Innes I found it strangely compelling, even if it went against my own instincts. Started as stained black canvases, Innes then worked them up to colour. Seen from the front their vertical bands were reminiscent of Barnett Newman, yet looking at the exposed sides of the canvases revealed something of the subtle build up of colour. They were a strong reaffirmation of pure intellectual abstraction and the power of minimalist paint to still carry ideas and emotion. With my faith in art restored we went onto Grafton Street and Carol and I went into the Disney store where she happily looked around in a childlike trance. Finally we had a meal in McDonald’s and looked around at the art books in Hodges Figgis before getting the DART home.                                                                                                   

States of Feeling at Hillsboro Fine Art

On the last day of August 2012, Carol and I went into town to see States of Feeling at Hillsboro Fine Art which included late paintings by Robert Motherwell and recent paintings by Gary Komarin and Larry Poons. Although I regarded Motherwell as the most significant of the three painters, his late work on show was mostly a minor reworking on a small scale his early abstract imagery. These small, late Motherwell’s were turgid and uninspiring - unlike his earlier signature works - though they played with similar amorphous, torso like shapes. The Komarin paintings were a revelation to me, since I had never heard of him or see his any of work. Though I detected echoes of Richard Diebenkorn, the Komarin paintings lacked any significant originality of form or style. Still, I found his deceptively simplified abstractions with dusty colours and splashy shapes very evocative.                                                                                           
However, it was Larry Poons paintings that left the strongest impression on me. Poons was a survivor of the vagaries of art world fashion that had briefly held him up as a major painter in the early 1960s but had slowly turned away from him as abstract painting’s dominance was challenged and then overthrown by Pop, installations, video and performance art. As young artist Poons’ hero was Mondrian and he consciously avoided the legacy of de Kooning that had turned so many weaker talents into pasticher’s of de Koonings hooked dynamic brushstrokes. Yet, despite his early fascination with geometric abstraction, Poons had later became one of the most energetic revitalizer’s of expressive abstraction. Over a sixty year career, Poons abstract painting had progressed from Geometric to Op-Art, to Post-Painterly Abstraction and in his last years a more expressive style that hinted at figurative elements. A good friend of Jules Olitski, in the late 1960s he had turned away from the more planned and structured abstract work that had initially made his reputation, to produce more spontaneous free form canvases in which he poured paint in rivulets down the canvas and then cropped them where appropriate. Yet, such canvases that often looked like abstract variations of Monet’s late water lily canvases were derided as mere backgrounds by many.                                                                                                       
  
I appreciated the free paint handling and form making Poons had arrived at after a lifetime of devotion to abstraction. His broken line and shimmering, scintillating colour reminded me of late Bonnard. I had thought they would be in oils, so I was surprised to find they were in acrylic often manipulated with his hands. Poons’ colour was electric and his handling of paint full of feeling. I thought they were some of the most exquisitely beautiful abstracts I had seen in years. Poons work made me want to get back to painting - the highest compliment I could possibly give. We topped off the day with a meal in KFC and a rummage around the art books in Chapters and Easons.

Gabriel Metsu At The National Gallery of Ireland

On a gray and rainy Friday 29^th October 2009, I went with Carol to the National Gallery of Ireland to see an exhibition of Gabriel Metsu, a neglected and underrated painter of the Dutch Golden Age. I was familiar with Metsu from two small companion oil paintings that had been donated to the National Gallery by Lord and Lady Beit in the 1980s - after they had been robbed and recovered from Irish criminals. The two paintings Woman Reading a Letter and Man Writing a Letter had long been two of my favourites in the National Gallery and with Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter, they offered an immediate chance to compare the techniques and styles of these two Dutch masters who both sadly died as they had just hit their prime.        

Both were part of the Dutch Golden Age, which after the Spanish Empire had signed a twelve-year truce with the Netherlands and formally recognized it as an independent commonwealth - saw an unprecedented period of peace, trade, commercial prosperity - and the flourishing of Dutch painting. The Dutch did not go in for the Italian love of religious, mythological or historical painting. They were common sense people and the art they liked was a mirror to their mercantile success. The Dutch genre picture was born from the low-life and moralizing pictures of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel in the early 16^th century. The Dutch painters of this middle-class genre specialized in low-life debauchery and high-life ‘merry-companies’. The genre produced a host of minor masters like Nicholas Maes, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard Terborch as well as Metsu and of course Vermeer who transcended the genre. Their work appealed to the common person’s love of stories, anecdotal details, realistic depiction, humour and moralizing. In a sense, they were lowbrow works but executed with a lot of talent and some originality.                                                                                     

                                             

Born three years apart and both dying in their late thirties, both Metsu and Vermeer had similar degrees of minor and purely local success in their day. Both produced a small number of finished and surviving works, Metsu about 130 oil paintings and Vermeer only about 34. Both specialized in domestic interiors scenes, Vermeer in a more distant manner - Metsu in a more interactive one. Both knew of each other’s work and were influenced by each other, in Metsu’s case the influence is obvious, Vermeer on the other hand - because of his distinctive style hid his influences better. Yet while Vermeer was almost forgotten in the following two hundred years, Metsu became highly collectable in the eighteenth century - especially amongst the Royal families of Europe. So much so, that Vermeer’s were sold as “in the manner of Metsu.” All this was to change in the late nineteenth century, when art critics, connoisseurs and writers like Proust wrote rapturously of Vermeer. The Impressionist generation of painters and art lovers, prized the painterly magic and originality of Vermeer, while at the same time poured scorn on the kind of minutely detailed and ‘fine’ painting of the likes of Metsu - whose reputation had never really recovered from this change in taste. This was the first exhibition devoted to Metsu since 1968, and the last book devoted to him had been published in 1974. Therefore, I saw this as a historically rewarding exhibition, which allowed modern day viewers to make up their own mind about Metsu.   

                                       

Before going into to see the exhibition of Metsu, I re-read my Heron History of Art volume on Baroque art and its chapters on the prolific and stunning Dutch Golden Age. While Vermeer had three pages of hyperbolic praise devoted to him, Metsu had just one dismissive paragraph: “Dutch art eventually became very tedious. If proof be needed, Metsu provides it. This latter painter was able to create illusion, but in him Gerrit Dou’s mastery became no more than a method; he took Vermeer’s stillness without his mystery... The truth is that Metsu was a cold painter. Ingres amply proved that coldness and stupidity do not preclude genius. Doubtless, Metsu could have proved an analogous demonstration if he had not been so strictly involved with school methods.” (Philippe Daudy, The XVIIth Century II, Heron History of Art, 1968, P. 37.)                     

                                                          

So as I entered the start of the exhibition, and began looking at Metsu’s early canvases my heart sank and my mind concurred with what I had read the night before. Metsu’s early low-life scenes painted on medium size canvases were workmanlike but uninspired. Reminiscent of Gerard Ter Borch, and countless other Dutch genre painters they lacked an authentic voice and offered little visual delight. Yet by the second room, I could already see a great leap forward in Metsu’s technique and maturing of his vision. As he grew into his art, his skill at rendering silk, velvet, fur, metal, wood and flesh became masterful. He was still painting subjects borrowed from others, yet his mastery of his medium was beginning to become evident, as where his own personal gifts of characterization and storytelling. As the size of his work shrank and he shifted from canvas to smooth wooden panels and minute and painstaking brushwork - his work began to exude a genuine glistening magic. In the crass modern age, big is often thought of as better - and even more difficult. Paintings like those of Metsu and Vermeer gave the lie to such primitive delusions. Their paintings made small details a trial of skill and patience beyond most blustering painters. Gerrit Dou for example was famous for spending days on a detail no bigger than a fingernail. I imagined that there must have been countless times when Metsu and Vermeer must have wanted to tear their hair out with despair - while trying to master a detail no bigger than an inch.          

Typically, Metsu painted on wooden panels that he prepared with a reddish brown, buff or grey ground - on which he painted a sketch in black and white, which produced a kind of black and white photograph. Over this, he then painted in colour, before finishing the painting off with a final layer of carefully modulated paint. He used a variety of brushstrokes from blended to stippled to scumbled depending on the surfaces he was trying to capture. Each layer of paint was thin and the final polished painting had virtually no impasto. Metsu’s fine brushwork was subtle but still visible up-close which gave his work a liveliness lacking in other painters of the period - like Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris - whose paintings had an enamelled polish that denied life. Amongst the paintings on show, my favourites were his; Still Life with a Dead Cockerel from 1655-8 whose stark mortality was more moving than many an over the top crucifixion, A Baker Blowing his Horn from 1660-3 which was almost surreal in its magic-realist combination of objects and action, The Intruder an erotic drama from 1661-3 and A Woman Composing Music, with an Inquisitive Man, from 1664-7, a beautiful and charming group scene, masterfully painted.

                 

The influence of Vermeer, was evident in Metsu’s later interior scenes yet the differences between them - were as telling as their superficial similarities. Vermeer’s work was almost dreamlike and uncanny whereas Metsu’s were more naturalistic. Vermeer’s use of a camera-obscurer was obvious - not only because of the strange perspectives, cropped compositions and spatial distortions - but also because of paintwork which seemed filtered and almost abstracted in parts. Vermeer’s use of optical devices may in part explain his rediscovery in the late nineteenth century as photography emerged. Perhaps, it took the photographic age to educate the public in the strange objectivity and dispassionate gaze of the lens. Metsu may have also used an optical device as an aid, but his work seemed far more conventional in its observation and application. While Vermeer presented interiors that were almost voyeuristic in their hidden-camera quality - of people caught unawares in their own silence - Metsu directly engaged us in conventional theatrical scenes that had been set up for an audience. In fact, they presented us with two very different kinds of aesthetics as dissimilar as hidden-camera spying and public theatrics respectively. The hidden-camera Vermeer was more radically modern - presenting a human solitude that was existential in its singularity. The theatrical Metsu was more of his period - presenting the spectacle of social dramas - anchored by a narrative that was traditional in its social discourse and moral presumptions. 

Sadly, the art world is a thing of fashion and bogus ratings. There are always a handful of winners and many losers. However, one of the purposes of the museum is to care for all with talent regardless of the vicissitudes of fashion - so that future generations, can make up their own minds and I for one found Metsu’s late paintings some of the most magnetic and stunning I had ever seen. Besides, even if Metsu was not as great as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals and a host of other Dutch masters he still possessed a talent and skill-set sadly all but lacking today.                                                                                

Apart from the forty oil paintings, there were also a few very rare drawings by Metsu – where he had sketched figures for his later oil paintings present in the show. In addition, there were costumes and objects like a linen night-rail, a pair of mules, an ornate buffalo drinking horn with silver gilt and a sewing cushion from Metsu’s day that all featured in his paintings - these gave an added depth to the exhibition.    After looking around the Metsu exhibition, we went around the permanent collection and looked at Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter. After being immersed in Mestu seeing it again was a shock to the system. Of course, it was a stupendous painting, of course, it was a work of genius and of course - it set me dreaming. However, was it any better than Metsu at his best? Maybe it was. But did it really matter? Besides, although Vermeer had always been an exemplary painter in my mind, I had never been able to rate him as highly as Rembrandt - who was in my opinion was the greatest Dutch artist ever and one of the greatest artists of all time. Vermeer and Mestu were masterful painters of small scenes, so had Rembrandt been in his early years. Nevertheless, Rembrandt had gone on to take in completely the rich pageantry of life. Rembrandt was a humane genius who had a vision of the world that transcended mere subjects or mediums – he was the Shakespeare of painting. Where Vermeer and Metsu had confined themselves to mostly oil painting, Rembrandt had produced drawings in chalk, and ink and etchings that were as great as anything ever done in those mediums. Vermeer and Metsu seemed to look at the work through microscopes – whereas Rembrandt could see the world from on high.                                       

We went to the gallery cafe and had Mocha’s and cakes. Carol had a Carrot cake and I had a Profiterole cake that melted in the mouth. We looked around the gallery bookshop and Carol bought me the catalogue for the Metsu exhibition and bought herself an amazing big book on Henry Darger.                   

As we collected our coats, the friendly girl told us that half the gallery would be closed next year for renovations. The roof was leaking and the heating had to be repaired. She told us also that the Metsu exhibition would be the last major exhibition in a long time because of budget cutbacks. I found it very sad and senseless to cut the funding of our National Gallery. Surely, to God, tourists wanted to come to Dublin to do more than just drink! And what about the up and coming generation of arts lovers and students, how were they going to educate themselves?