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.                

The Quick and The Dead

On Thursday 4^th June 2009, I ventured into town with Carol to see an exhibition in The Dublin City Gallery Hugh Lane. It was my first trip into the city in a month and since we were both broke it was my first trip on a bus in nearly a year. The sun was high and hot in the sky, the wind was cool, and dirty Dublin looked better than usual. Looking around the city and seeing dozens of very attractive, sexy and happy looking women – I felt like a man released from prison to find that life was still going on in the city. Yet it was also depressing to see so many premises boarded up – victims of the economic depression.                          

    

I had been lured out of my house to see The Quick and the Dead an exhibition of Irish Neo-Expressionists from the 1980s. In 1986, Patrick Graham (b.1943), Brian Maguire (b.1951), Patrick Hall (b.1935) and Timothy Hawkesworth were featured in 4 Irish Expressionist Painters – a collaborative exhibition between Northeastern University and Boston College. The exhibition had been staged to coincide with Politics and the Arts in Ireland a conference held by the Irish Studies Programme in Boston College. All four had been born in Ireland, though Hawkesworth had emigrated to the U.S. by 1977. However, he had begun to exhibit in Ireland since the turn of the millennium, including a show in The Royal Hibernian Academy in recent years.         

                                                                                              

The show in the Hugh Lane brought together a handful of their early paintings and a larger number of their most recent works to show how their art had developed since then. Although classed as Irish Neo-Ex’s these painters could also have been called Irish Neo-Gothic artists. Their dark, pained, thwarted and shamed paintings registered the morbid Catholicism of Ireland in the 1980s amidst the hysterics of a dying religion. Graham and Maguire had been teenage heroes of mine and I had followed their work closely ever since.                                          

                                                                  

Given our new economic and social crisis, this show was timely as it transported us back to the troubled Ireland of the 1980s. After a decade of prosperity and peace when we in Ireland had felt we could take on the world, we had seen our economic bubble burst and public unrest grow. Fear, panic and anger had returned to Ireland in the space of one calamitous year – so it was a perfect time to show these agi-prop works of the soul from the decade in which we had been called ‘the sick man of Europe’. It was also a reminder of the emotional, confessional and confrontational approach to painting that had been pushed aside by more photo and process based painting in the past twenty years. Plus, by featuring all Irish based artists it was cheaper to stage than one based on expensive, in demand foreign artists.              

In the catalogue, Ireland was said to have been in a schizophrenic state in the 1980s torn between the troubled past and an uncertain future. Apart from our economic crisis and the mass emigration of many of our most ambitious and talented young people - we lived in a state of fear and despair as we witnessed the outrages of Northern Ireland and fought cultural wars in the South around the subjects of; divorce, abortion, contraception, homosexuality, pornography and the role of the Catholic Church in modern Irish society. As such, the work of these and other Neo-Expressionist like Brian Bourke and Michael Kane – documented our cultural and national, identity crisis – or at least as it was seen from a very masculine perspective.                                                                                                     

These angry, political and antagonistic Irish paintings - obsessed with the body and its place within the state might have been part of a Neo-Expressionist bandwagon but it fit the Irish character at the time like a glove. The grimness of Graham, Maguire and to a lesser extent Hall and Hawkesworth – went deliberately and defiantly against previous Irish academic art, abstract bank art and popular culture. They were accused of egotism, misogyny, socio-political incorrectness and the production of reactionary painting by their numerous critics – particularly those in the pages of Circa magazine. In the end their dedication and integrity had paid off and they all went on to be represented by our best private galleries, exhibited in our best museums and bought and sold by some of our biggest businessmen.                                    

By and large, our painters in the early 1980s lacked the finances and support of rich painters in New York or Cologne and so had to make ends meet as best they could. The Irish art world had always been small, but in the eighties it was especially restricted in terms of the number of active collectors. So denied sales, most painters had to apply to the Arts Council, for the cost of a large canvas and some paint. But the number of grants was small, the grants limited in finance and competition was fierce. Arguably, the likes of Graham and Maguire achieved far more than most with what resources they had. They were also lucky to have the support of dealers like Blaithin De Sachy.                                                             

The drab, shoddy look, of many of these Irish Neo-Ex’s canvases – the paucity of colour, crudeness of drawing and lack of sensually handled paint - could make these hard works for the unfeeling, bourgeois art lover to enjoy. Added to that was their frequent mixture of painting and writing – which repelled the occasional art goer unfamiliar with the precedents of Picasso’s Cubist paintings, René Magritte’s Pipe, Beuys lectures or Dubuffet, Twombly and Basquiat’s graffiti inspired work. Personally, I admired the honesty, bravery and intensity of their works.                        

                                                      

Looking at the early work of Graham, Maguire and Hawkesworth, I was struck by my own painterly timidity in comparison. I had always loved ordered chaos and usually respected the picture plane. The writing on my paintings in comparison to theirs was far more neurotic, naïve, voluminous and unself-conscious in its graphomania.                 

                                                                        

Graham again came out of this show in my mind as the greatest painter alive in Ireland – our most honest, agonized and redemptive. His work was also the most consistent of the four. Graham, was a shy unassuming man who never pushed his art as shamelessly as others and so while achieving success, failed to win the wider recognition he deserved. He was notoriously media shy and rarely attended even his own openings. All of the texts on Graham spoke of his early precociousness but having seen nothing done before 1980 - I had to take his advocates word for it. It was seeing an exhibition of paintings by Emil Nolde in Dublin that made Graham realize that his academically prized work was limited, safe and dishonest. Nolde’s highly expressive and daring paintings encouraged Graham to adopt a rawer more expressive style and to push beyond mere facility.              

                                                                         

By the 80s, both Graham and Maguire had developed an art of fragmentation – of paintings that did not quite fit together – divided through drawing or composition – or literally ripped apart in the case of Graham’s fragile, battered and repainted images. Graham seemed to test his paintings to destruction – ripping, tearing and stabbing his canvases and then remounting, sowing or stapling them back together onto a new larger piece – I envied their intensity.   

                                                                               

Graham’s pallet had since the 1980s been dominated by greys, whites, blacks and small shots of blue, red and pink. His paintings centred around the figure and landscape - and the need to make sense of their relationship. In interviews and writing, Graham cited the likes of Piero Della Francisca and Andrea Mantegna as influences – and I could see it – but other names like Kiefer, Lucio Fontana, Twombly and Basquiat came to mind sooner. Though, these never received a mention from Graham – a typical professional artist’s obscuration.                                                                                               

Graham’s work played with revelation and concealment, sexual longing and castration, spiritual quest and abandoned pain. His work was intensely private and intelligent in its attempt to find a lasting beauty that did not pastiche itself.                                                                                                              

In recent canvases like Famine (Mayo Series) 2006 – Graham wrote an initial draught of writing on the canvas – and then corrected this writing in the manner of a Christian Brother upbraiding an unruly pupil. In the centre of the black cross – was pinned a small pearl drop earring – just one of many small fetishistic details, hidden on first sight by the huge scale of Graham’s work.                                              

Maguire on the other hand appeared to have developed more as an artist and human being in the past few decades – mapped through an engagement with social politics and the lives of the poor. In this he was a rarity amongst Expressionists. Maguire recognised early on that Expressionism could be fatally solipsistic, voyeuristic and self-aggrandising. So by the late 1980s he had began to teach and work with marginalised groups like prisoners, psychiatric patients and children in the slums of Sao Paulo. However, I wondered if he had merely replaced the voyeurism of Expressionism for the voyeurism of Fine Art socialism. Few of his paintings of marginalized people told me anything about them as human beings other than as life-models or objects of social propaganda.                                                                  

Maguire’s early paintings recalled the Berlin nudes of Kirchner, but his latter work had evolved into a more open, lyrical and painterly style. Maguire’s early drawing was woeful but by his later years he had achieved a subtle and evocative form of charcoal drawing that he often left exposed under the acrylic in his paintings.                                                                                                                           

Maguire’s best painting in the show, was the massive double canvas Memorial, 1998, which was based on the killings of prisoners in a riot in Carandiru Prison in Sao Paulo. Maguire had bought the rights to the photo archive of the riots from the O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper for a nominal fee and also interviewed some of the prisoners and a warden who had witnessed the killings. In charcoal, Maguire had drawn the battered bodies of the prisoners laid out in their coffins - amidst an ethereal field of dripped and cascading white, grey, ochre and black paint. Their coffins appeared to float upwards - hopefully towards some kind of peace. It was elegiac and heartbreaking - and for once Maguire had used subtle, aesthetic persuasion to engage the viewer politically.                                                                          

Patrick Hall’s work bore similarities to Outsider art, famous Italian’s like Enzo Cucchi and more obscure German Neo-Expressionists like early Walter Dahn. I found Hall’s work far less convincing and memorable than any of his influences. There was a gimmicky quality to many of his later paintings in particular that failed to impress me. My favourite piece by Hall was Doll-House, 2008 - an old wooden doll house painted in a faux-naïve outsider style. It looked funky and collectable like a lot of the ‘outsider’ art that was hot in New York in the late 1990s – but I didn’t think it meant much of anything.                                    

Timothy Hawkesworth was the weakest and most irrelevant of the four painters for me. His work did not seem to add much to Expressive painting that had not already been said first and better by Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly or Martin Disler. His best work for me was his early canvases like The Sower at Night from 1986 and Sweet Song from 1992. Yet when I heard he had spent over two years on The Sower At Night I was dumb-founded that he had still failed to resolve it. Hawkesworth’s later paintings just looked like flaccid messes of expensive paints – in the vein of late Jules Olitski – though not nearly as good.                                                                                                                        

Despite my restricted budget I simply had to buy the catalogue for the exhibition and a small pocket book on Graham by Gandon Editions from 1992 (€32 in total – half of what I would normally spend in their excellent bookshop.) The text in the exhibition catalogue was very good but it was let down by the awful quality of most of the reproductions. In the age of digital camera’s there was no excuse for this. I was also irked by the fashionable photographing of many of the paintings from a distance in the gallery – like an installation and the fetishistic photographing of their studios.                               

While in the Hugh Lane we also had a chance to see Yinka Shonibare’s installation Egg Fight, 2009. It was inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, particularly the endless battles between Lilliput and Blefuscu over which end of an egg one should open – Swift’s disguised comment on the many wars between Catholic France and Protestant England in the eighteenth century. Shonibare was an interesting if somewhat limited artist. Born in 1962, he grew up in Nigeria but later studied in England and most of his work played off these two cultural heritages in a knowing and stylish way. In 2004, he had been shortlisted for the Turner Prize – but for me he was always a poor man’s Chris Ofili and he came many years after the initial groundbreaking yBa’s.                                                                                         

The installation consisted of two rifle men mannequins, in uniforms of the eighteenth century – but made of Dutch wax patterns popular in Africa. Between the two figures was a rope net filled with eggs - which were in fact made of polystyrene and hand-painted to look like eggs. There were a few broken ‘eggs’ their yellow and white yokes spilled out onto the white platform – but this was in fact yellow and white silicon. Overall it was an intelligent and hip illustration of post-modern simulation, visual sampling and recoding - given a post-colonial spin. But it was not a work I ever had to see again.       

    

Accompanying this installation was a separate series of collages entitled Climate Shit Drawings, 2008-2009 by Shonibare. The shit in the title - came in the form of photographs of turds in various sizes and colours – cut out and pasted onto whimsical collages which teemed with various things like ocean liners in trouble and very mundane observations on disaster written all over the page - along with arty doodling. It was a big theme dealt with in a glib, first-year, fashion student kind of way. My usual fondness for looking very closely at an art work was confounded by the sight of the shit – even if they were merely reproductions of the natural waste products of every single human being on the planet. This was compounded by a deeper concern with the copying of the idea from the likes of Gilbert and George and Chris Ofili. As for what any of it meant as a statement on Climate change, disaster or the end of the world – I hadn’t a clue. The greatest shame of these collages was their total waste of beautiful, modern, black and gold frames - which must have cost quite a pretty penny. These works were literally crap!               

Finally, we had another quick look around the permanent collection to review our favourite paintings. Carol loved Claude Monet’s Lavacourt Under Snow, c.1878-79 - with its sexy mix of whites, blues and pinks thrown down with skill, passion and delight. I loved John Lavery’s luscious oil on panel painting of his wife and daughter skiing – rendered with an enviable economy of bravura brushstrokes. Before we left, we decided to have one final look around The Quick and The Dead – which repaid our reviewing with more revelations. We decided not to waste our money in the cafe and went to McDonald’s instead which we thoroughly enjoyed. That night when I fell asleep, I dreamed I was back in the Hugh Lane alone, looking at the Patrick Graham’s – and floating on air.

Alice Maher and Ellen Gallagher

In October 2007, I saw - two important exhibitions of art by women in Dublin. Usually I would not even bother going to these - but Carol as an art student naturally loved female artists. Apart from a few decent artists like Kahlo, O'Keeffe, Bourgeois, Rego, Emin and Gallagher - I had no real interest in women's art. Their concerns were not my concerns, their styles are not my favourites and their over-hyped political promotion made me sick. However, I didn't hate their work anymore than that of 99% of all the male artists I knew.

           

I am had by now become reluctant to write about these shows because I either felt fatigued at the prospect - or I was worried about the knee-jerk emails from women in response to my personal opinions and jokes. In my experience my readers would listen to me berating male artists work for pages - but if I said boo to a female artist – in their eyes I was a meat eating, war mongering, racist and misogynist. It was all so juvenile, humourless and the product of self-interest - for me ever to respond to these attacks.

             

If there was a theme running through my whole writing on art it at this time – it was a belief that there was such a thing as great art - usually because of history that meant male artists - but every year - more and more genuinely great female artists were emerging. On Internet sites like deviantart and mypace - I had found far more talented up and coming female artists than men - in fact, it was a eight to two ratio. Moreover I adored that fact that my girlfriend was such a talented and passionate graphic designer and by then a fine art student - and I loved being able to give her advice and support her art. There was no sex war in our house we both thought it all a joke.

             

So anyway on the first weekend of October - I went with my girlfriend to The National Gallery of Ireland - were we saw a wonderful exhibition of portrait drawings. Gems by Antonio Pollaiuolo, Francesco Bonsignori, Jean-Dominique Ingres, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Adolf Menzel, Augustus John and William Orpen and Paul Klee delighted us both. This was real drawing, real art and real skill and imagination at work. However, I could not say the same for the Alice Maher's exhibition of charcoal and pencil drawings at the RHA.

             

The Night Garden by Maher - was an exhibition inspired by Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Maher had been exhibiting in Ireland and abroad since the 1990s - to some minor success.

             

Putting aside the smug hubris of this woman to think herself an interpreter of Bosch - the show was poster and wallpaper art of the most boring and contrived kind. I was sure she was a lovely woman, I was sure she was sincere, I was sure she was very clever - but a true artist born to create? I thought not. I thought art was merely an easy social option for her. She had talent - but no real originality or passion. It was all too similar to the art made by countless female professors of fine art in art schools across the Western World - dry, derivative, smug, and myopic.

             

As usual, her work was well made, well meaning, diligent but utterly lacking even a flicker of the-sacred-fire. There was no mystery or originality in Maher’s work - just cliché. Her black and white drawings in charcoal and the various works inspired by them seemed far too similar to the greater and more original drawings of Francesco Clemente who had practically reinvented the symbolic figure in Western art in the late 1970s (after a prolonged silencing of the language of the body by abstract art and conceptualism.) However, Maher's work had none of the beauty or enigma of the Italian. Once again Maher's work struck me as academic, contrived and riddled with a rag-bag of Feminist art clichés (long female hair, animals, breasts, breast feeding, menstruation, the moon, the sun, plant forms and so on) derived from more original and heartfelt artists like Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Eva Hesse, Nancy Spero Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois. It was looking at works like these that made me quite happy not to write for a newspaper - and be forced to write about artists like Maher.

             

You know I saw the original Bosch painting in the Prado in 2004 - it is big (it’s about eight feet high and seven and a half feet wide when it is side panels are closed over) and it had burned into my very soul and set my pulse racing. It is quite simply one of the greatest paintings I have ever seen. Bosch’s depiction of male and female nudes is skilful and delightful, his painting of animals entrancing, his musical instruments and grotesque but stylish monsters enigmatic, his colours are so strong and evocative, and the whole panel teems with minute details and beasts conjured from his imagination. A man or woman could sit and look at this painting for an hour a day till they died - and still find new mysteries, details and insights. It took me a brisk walk around of ten minutes to drain Maher's work of all its aesthetic interest. The Bosch painting was an Atom-Bomb of a painting still radiating after nearly five centuries - in contrast Maher's brand-new vast charcoal work (taking up practically the whole of the RHA) was an unexploded dud!

            

Then on the bank holiday weekend at the tail end of October - we went to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane to see Coral Cities - an exhibition of paintings, collages and craved paper by Ellen Gallagher. Carol was a huge fan of Gallagher's work since it had so many elements of collage in it - for it was my girlfriend’s first love.

             

However, I went with my critical dagger drawn ready to cut her down to size. I suspected that Ellen Gallagher - a beautiful mixed race American (her mother Irish American her absent father an African American) was nothing more than a mascot for a politically correct art world - more concerned with identity than artistic quality. Add to that the growing tendency of Irish museums to rope in any major artist abroad with the vaguest link to Ireland - and you might understand my scepticism.

             

When I had seen her work in reproduction it had looked like timid, boring, art-school stuff. But I had never had a chance to see her work in reality - and that I was soon to learn - was crucial to judging Gallagher's art.

             

As we entered the first room, my heart sank as I looked around and saw large apparently blank white sheets of watercolour paper. However, as I got up close to them my heart jumped for joy. She had cut and carved into the paper - creating highly detailed and well-drawn (or well-carved) images of fish, octopuses and African women's heads with wild flowing hair. In my experience, there are few artists whose work reproduces so badly in print. That is no reflection on the skills of her photographers - merely an indication of how subtle her effects are.

             

These works were quite simply some of the most beautiful, gentle, inventive and skilled contemporary work on paper I have seen in years. I had such a compelling desire to gently run my fingers over her carved, cut, water-coloured and collaged works on high quality watercolour paper. I wanted to share a drink with her - and just listen to her talk. Like a great flirt - Gallagher knew how to say just enough to gain your interest - and had the control to leave you waiting in baited breath - for more.

             

If you wanted me to get heavy handed - I could have said that work dealt with themes of African American women's desire to look white or the subtle forms of self-racism the oppressed sometimes inflict upon themselves. However, that would make her work sound too rhetorical and aggressive. Looking at her work, I was reminded of the wise and softly spoken poetry of Mya Angelo - not the aggressive heroics of Jean-Michel Basquiat or the Feminist screaming of The Guerrilla Girls.

             

Some art works shout at you - Gallagher's whisper to you: "Come here I want to tell you a secret.” Her work reminded me of Georgian flower and plant watercolours, Outsider art, Marlene Dumas watercolour nudes, Chris Ofili's intricately patterned and collaged paintings and many other female artists interested in natural forms and female identity like Nancy Spero. However, at no time did I feel she was pastishing or plagiarizing others - her own vision was consistent throughout. Yes, her art was identity art - but she had so much more to say about life than just what colour her skin was. I quickly sheathed my weapon and bowed in homage.

             

Gallagher's work had a wonderfully obsessive and secretive quality. There was none of the tedious narcissism of Tracey Emin, none of the boring repetition of Rachel Whiteread, none of the bogus Feminist rant of Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer and none of the attention seeking of well - take your pick of exhibitionist female artists of my day. Although Gallagher had private schooling and a fairly easy road to the top of the New York art world (in 1995 she was shown in the Whitney Biennial - aged only thirty - and two years later she was a Gagosian artist) I felt her art was truly self-driven and not reliant on the world around her - I knew that success or failure would not stop her need to create.

             

After we had gone around the show once - Carol pleaded: "Do you want to go around again?" "Yes sure!" I replied. So we looked over the work afresh - still enthralled by this wonderful woman's discrete and highly skilled works. Was she a great artist up there with the best of the past twenty years - I thought so - but then that didn’t really say much. These days were truly awful times for contemporary art.  However, I looked forward to watching her understated and very intelligent and compassionate art develop.