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.                

Basil Blackshaw at Eighty

On 11^th September 2012, Carol’s friend Anne drove us up to the F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio in Banbridge Co. Down to see a retrospective of paintings and drawings by Basil Blackshaw a painter’s painter who had been a hero of my old art teacher Kenneth Donfield. There were few Irish artists I would travel such a distance to see - but Basil Blackshaw was one of them. The border between North and South was so subtle that we looked around unsure if we had entered the North. But when we saw the Union Jack flying over housing estates - a primal shudder ran down my spine. Still apart from the flags there was little to distinguish between Republic of Ireland bungalows and Unionist bungalows. After a life time of watching ‘The Troubles’ on television, I had avoided Northern Ireland like the plague, so it was my first ever trip to the North and I was pleasantly surprised by how normal it was. The centre was a beautiful one with very friendly and helpful staff. Before going around the exhibition, Anne bought us coffees and delicious scones with cream and strawberry jam.                                                                                  

                 

I did not think much of F.E. McWilliam’s work, though I did find his more intimate and personal small sculptural maquettes more interesting than his large scale bronzes. I found F.E. McWilliam’s version of surrealism kitsch and inelegant and his expressionistic work inspired by the bombings of The Troubles unredeemably brutalistic. Looking at McWilliam’s various 3d playthings, it struck me again that sculpture could descend into abysmal kitsch faster than painting ever could. However, I admired F.E. McWilliam’s more conventional portraits and busts from early in his career – and it struck me again, that many regional artists had not profited from their modernist adventures. McWilliam seemed to have given up on such slow and deliberate study of form and turned to make a series of pastiches of fashionable styles - yet originating nothing. Still, I wondered what kind of artist he might have been if he had more integrity and courage to avoid the allure of each passing fad.                                                                      

 The retrospective of over sixty years of work by Basil Blackshaw proved to me that he was painting better and better. His early work was very strong and always wonderfully painterly with hints at an obsessive interest in Cézanne and Walter Sickert. More conservative art lovers must have been most impressed by his realist paintings and drawings of horse races but I found them somewhat irrelevant in the age of photography and lacking the intimacy of his paintings of his pets. Though, Blackshaw’s portraits of friends (mostly male) were evocative, I personally found his ‘portraits’ of his dogs and horses truly insightful and full of love and respect. Blackshaw never made a casual or sloppy brushstroke though his freedom and searching might have made the unsophisticated think otherwise. He was a master of creams, browns, greys, blacks and muted colours - yet his efforts at strong pure colour did not convince me.                                                                                   

                                                                

It was Blackshaw’s paintings since the age of sixty-eight that most impressed me. They married a modern day freedom reminiscent of Cy Twombly and even Basquiat (especially with their deployment of writing and painterly erasure) with a lifetime of realist skills and criticality – to create some of the strongest arguments in favour of contemporary painting. They were so much more than mere ideas in paint - they were paint come to life to embody a spiritual manifestation. His hard-won virtuosity went beyond uncritical illustration, tedious realism and crass expression into a painterly grandeur only a few ever achieved. In his late paintings he made everything look childishly easy - but as a fellow painter I knew what kind of mental and physical labour had gone into such final life affirming freedom. These late paintings were some of the very best and most relevant I had seen in years. I felt inspired to paint in the presence of such valiant and free expressions. Before we left we bought the catalogue for the exhibition, however I was disappointed when I saw how poorly lit, discoloured and unfocused the reproductions of the paintings were.                                                                                                                      

Strangely in retrospect, I found my initial impression of Blackshaw’s work diminished. His early work struck me as too academic and his later work overshadowed by the far greater examples of Cy Twombly and Jean Michel Basquiat, still he was one of the few real painters in Ireland.

Julian Schnabel at Hillsboro Fine Art 2009

Tipped off by a friend on MySpace, I learned that an exhibition of works on paper by Julian Schnabel was on its last day of display in the Hillsboro Fine Art gallery, which specialized in 20^th Century and Contemporary Art. So on Saturday 10^th October, at 9:45am, I left my house full of excitement and travelled into town on the bus over-flowing with expectation. I had hoped Carol would join me but she had to sleep after a night of collaging.                                                                                                      

Hillsboro Fine Art, was directly opposite the Rotunda Hospital’s new entrance on Parnell Square. However when I arrived at the gallery at 10:30am - when it was due to open - I found the door locked and the galleries lights off. In desperation, I rang the intercom three times and then knocked on the door three times, before realizing there was no one there. From the window, I could see a beautiful Schnabel painting on paper - under glass and framed in a lovely black frame. I was so close and yet so far!                                                            

I decided to go to Chapters bookshop in order to kill sometime - where I bought a small book on Egon Schiele. Then I went back to the gallery at 11am but it was still closed! So I went down to Easons’ to look around. It was absolutely packed with news people, photographers and slack-jawed heavy-metal fans, pressed around to see Ozzy Osbourne who was signing books. I saw the back of his head as he signed autographs but I felt contemptuous of the whole circus. I went to McDonalds and had a Big Mac meal, which I loved.                                                                                                                                       

Then I went back to the Hillsboro gallery only to find it still closed at 12pm. I was just about to leave when a gallery woman came and unlocked the door. “Eh, is the exhibition still open to view?” I asked her desperately. “Eh, yes you can come in, but I am only here to receive a delivery.” She replied in a kindly manner. “Oh, thank you! I’m not a collector, I’m just an artist but I came into town especially to the Schnabel’s! I am a huge Schnabel fan!” I exclaimed. She let me into the gallery and turned on the lights.                                                                                                         

Apart from Schnabel’s works, the exhibition New York Contemporary included small paintings on canvas by Ross Bleckner, Donald Baechler, David Salle and Jeff Schneider - none of which I was very impressed by - in fact I could think of countless Irish painters who had shown better works in Dublin in recent years. But, I was delighted and enthralled, by the Neo-Abstract-Expressionist Schnabel works on view.                                                                                                                

He was represented by about six hand-painted screen-prints, with resin dripped on them. They dated from 1995 and came from editions of 80. In fact, despite the fact they were in part screen-prints, Schnabel’s personality oozed from them. Again, I was struck by the Joie de Vivre of Schnabel’s Neo-Salon brand of Expressionism and its total lack of angst. The colours were bold and strong – fuchsia pinks, cobalt blues, and darker blues and burnt reds - brushed on in semi-thick, textured, gestural strokes - around which he wrote words like; La Blusa Rosa, Otono, Mujer, Invierno, and Primaveral’ which gave the works their titles. The works reflected Schnabel’s new life with his Spanish wife Olatz and his visits to Spain that year. They were inspired works, which relied on Schnabel’s subconscious manipulation of forms and materials. They reminded me of late Miró canvases that mixed surrealism with the sale and effects of Abstract-Expressionism and the later works of Cy Twombly with their ad-hoc mixture of classical words and abstract scribbles of paint. The largest pieces like La Blusa Rosa I were about 40” x 32” where as the others were slightly smaller at about 40” x 30.” They were all works on stiff watercolour paper of an average quality. Dripped and pooled on the paper, was thick golden looking resin, in anthropomorphic shapes, which proved very effective and suggestive of phalluses or torsos. Even if to the uninitiated, his work could have looked slap-dash, haphazard and crude - I was struck by the artfulness within the apparent chaos of Schnabel’s work. I found his abstract works emotionally engaging and his brushwork skilful and measured. He just had a knack for making beautiful splashes and swirls of paint - which evoked thoughts of places and people.                                                                            

There was also a colour lithograph based on a black and white photo of his stunningly beautiful wife Olatz. She looked out of the picture with a sultry stare, with her hands behind the back of her head - above which he had crudely painted in white My Wife. It was merely a family snapshot, given the professional artists gloss, of a fine art print enhancement and glorification. It was factory made Expressionism and the weakest work on show. The work was the 31st print, of an edition of 2000, and was selling for €2, 500! The more ambitious pieces were not priced. Despite the worst economic depression in Ireland since the 1930s, I was astonished to find all the Schnabel works had sold – though I agreed with the buyers and only wished I had that kind of money.                                                                

Also in the show were works by Jeff Schneider who used a cowboy motif repeatedly, but his efforts looked little-better than a young graduates efforts. There were a couple of black and white paintings in oils by Donald Baechler, which I liked, but did not think they added up to much.                    

            

I looked around to find the David Salle works but could not recognize them. Ross Bleckner was represented by two small oil still-life’s of flowers in a kind of fuzzy Post-Impressionistic style which left bare linen underneath to add to the fuzziness. I thought them utterly redundant works. So I concentrated my last few minutes looking again at the Schnabel’s and for once I was consumed with the desire to own art. I thanked the woman and left soaring on air as I walked back through the city.

Now’s The Time

On the last Saturday of November 2008, I went with Carol to the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, in order to see their exhibition Now’s the Time - an interesting group show of late Modern and Post-Modern artists - who had all died young. The show featured work by; Piero Manzoni, Eva Hesse, Bas Jan Ader, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jean-Michel Basquait, Keith Haring, Martin Kippenberger, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Helen Chadwick, Michel Majerus and Jason Rhodes. Basquiat who died at twenty-seven was the youngest of the artists while Michel Majerus who died at forty-five was the oldest. Most had died before their late thirties or early forties. Given the relatively short careers of these artists’ it was not surprising that the work looked vibrant, fresh and witty - but also lacked the grandeur and complexity of mature art.                                             
                                               

It was my first trip to an art gallery in many months - and my first trip into town in weeks. It was less than one degree centigrade, and the cities buildings were cloaked in a cold mist. I felt like a stranger in my own city. I felt confused by all the new shops and lamented the passing of many of the icons of Dublin past. At the time I did not enjoy being out of the sanctuary of my home. I hated the crowds, the bustle and the bitter cold. However when I returned home I felt the benefit of a day out.

I found Now’s the Time a delightful and inspiring exhibition that was both accessible and inventive. When I entered the first gallery of the show to see two large acrylic paintings and a very large oil-stick word drawing by Basquait - I let out a yelp of joy and grabbed Carol’s arm in delight. The drawing Untitled, 1983, featured diagrams and words mixed with crude childlike drawings of train lines, baseballs, skulls, lumps of coal - and seemed to be a brief treatise on; the use of Chinese labourers to build the American railway lines, the exploitation of the poor, the history of commodities and the history of African Americans. This I could all deduce from the words and images in the drawings and from over eighteen years studying his iconography. However, to the uninitiated this drawing must have seemed like a rambling list without rhythm-nor-reason - made by an artist who drew like a demented child. Even I as a rabid fan of Basquait’s work had to admit to Carol that it was a minor drawing by him. 

A far more major work was the large acrylic and oil-stick diptych Grazing – Soup to Nuts, MGM – 1930, 1983. Painted with vibrant candy pink, baby blue, white, black and green oil-sticks on top of a ground of an eggy yellow - which had then been partly over-painted, with a matt black - making the whole diptych look like a demented school blackboard. In parts of the painting, Basquiat - had scuffed and smeared the oil-stick lines with the heel of his hand – giving the work a more raw, intense feel. Basquiat played off images of dinosaurs with diagrams of pelvises, intestines, and leaves - conjuring up in my mind - images from old Ray Harryhausen monster flicks from the early days of Hollywood and the jottings of a teenager in a copybook. I absolutely loved it - and would have been ecstatic to own it.                                                                                                                
The final painting by Basquiat in the show Fat’s II, 1987, was a far more minimal and stripped down text painting - clearly influenced by the abstract word paintings of Cy Twombly. In parts of the painting – snapped-off lumps of oil stick stuck to the canvas – like exclamation marks of haste. This huge canvas with a few dozen words related to Jazz - on a plain grey ground was a lesson in scale - it hurt me to take. How much more impressive would my paintings have looked - if I had been able to paint them on large canvases like Basquiat?  

The rest of the show was a come down from the Basquiat’s. The zany Keith Haring acrylic and oil painting Aids, 1985 - simply looked like the kind of trippy, Robert Crumb inspired doodles - made by countless teenagers who fancy themselves as creative. As a painting, it had minimal interest in the flesh. Apart from the fact that the eye-popping, wriggly, drawing of monster figures having sex on a zany, yellow ground - looked black from six feet away – but close to revealed itself to have been painted in indigo blue. The lines in Harings painting were almost print-like – so limited was his exploitation of the subtleties of the brushed line. Like an Op-Art canvas this Haring was wearing on the eyes after less than a few minutes – leaving me in a daze.

             

Far more impressive was a suit of pencil and marker drawings on hotel stationary by Martin Kippenberger. The nine drawings that formed Untitled (The Invention of a Joke) 1991, came courtesy of The Kerlin Gallery – which made me wonder if I had seen them in 1991 as part of Kippenberger’s show with Oehlen in The Kerlin. However, I could not for the life of me - remember seeing them before – not a sign of truly great art. The drawings depicted Mexican’s in Sombreros and with rifles at cafes, in buildings or in landscapes. Their very lightness as art, their cool humour and humility struck me with delight – like a refreshing sorbet after a main course of meaty Basquait’s.                                     

The Kippenberger’s were hung in the same room as Untitled, 1996-2001, a large multi-panel painting by Michel Majerus - who had clearly been influenced by his older German contemporary who had frequently created similar multi-panel paintings done in contradictory styles. Carol liked Majerus’ work a lot - but I found it a limited example of abstract and graphic design pastiches. His work was neither passionate nor cynical – merely decorative - Neo-Salon Pop. I was also irked - by Majerus’ use of photographic silk-screens - for his images of people. Was he incapable of painting figuratively? Overall, I found his work not much better than that of mediocre graduate students.   

Felix Gonzales-Torres’ with Untitled (NRA), 1991, - a perfect stack of large sheets of paper printed with a red boarder and black insert which visitors could take away with them -  played witty games with the history of minimalism stretching back to Kasmir Malevich and later Ad Reinhard. I could see why Gonzales-Torres had been such a success in the New York art world in the 1990s. His art was humble, smart, politically-correct and utterly harmless.           
                                                         
The great surprise of the show for me was Gordon Matta-Clark whose architectural interventions in which he cut holes into buildings - struck me as sculpturally groundbreaking - and unexpectedly moving in a week of home repossessions and a terrorist assault on Mumbai. They struck me - as Cubist inspired deconstructions of buildings - which we tried to take shelter inside in the hope of safety. 

Eva Hesse’s Addendum, 1967, a grey papier-mâché wooden board, with small teats with grey painted cords - falling onto the gallery floor in coils and spirals - made me come back to look at it again and again. I loved its subtlety, tenderness, craftsmanship and its echoing of both modern macho minimalist work and prehistoric nature inspired art. I admired the soft-spoken feminism of Hesse’s work - which played off the more aggressive work of Minimalists - like Carl André, Donald Judd and Richard Serra.                                
                                                                                      
Piero Manzoni’s Magic Base, 1961, a wooden pyramid plinth with felt foot-pads placed on top of it - gave a chuckle. Manzoni had originally intended visitors to stand on the plinth and thus become one of his art works. However, the plinth was now too fragile and valuable to allow this. Like his famous cans of ‘artist shit’ (which may in fact have been just plaster) Magic Base was typical of Manzoni’s attempt to making everything art. I had always admired Manzoni - and been delighted - by his light metaphysical jokes. The trouble is as art they could only be done once – many later copied his ideas but they failed to emulate his timing. Unlike so many of the academic bores who copied him at the crossroads of the millennium – he was never pretentious, elitist or over did it.                      

Helen Chadwick’s glossy photographs of flowers arranged into vulvic shapes made me feel a bit sick – like after a night of looking at too much internet porn.                          
                           
I found the Bas Jan Ader video of flower arranging - utterly pointless and cliché and like most video work - I did not give it a second look.           
                                                                    

The Jason Rhodes collected rubbish sculptures with purple neon - reminded me less of great art and more of the junk sculptures Malory’s boyfriend Nick used to make - on the 1980s US comedy Family Ties.                                                                                                                
Majerus, Torres, Ader and Rhoads all struck me as symptomatic of the intellectual bankruptcy of most contemporary artists – who despite their lengthy educations, faddish popularity, commercial promotion and the vast scale of many of their works – had nothing important to say.                    

Before we left The Hugh Lane - we had a quick look around at the other exhibits. Carol wanted to look at the Fergus Martin (b.1955 in Cork) exhibition because he had recently given a talk in NCAD – so I reluctantly agreed.                                                                                         

So what did I see? Vertical rectangular canvases with thick stretchers - painted in one flat acrylic colour (dull brown or green, or electric blue) – with a horizontal (squarish) rectangle of bare canvas left at the corner.                             
                                                                                        
On the floor, there were some sculptures. So what did I see? Shinny purple cylinders - about the length of baseball bats - lined up perfectly in a line on the floor. “The fucking plaster work in this room is more interesting!” I exclaimed to Carol - and stormed out of the beautiful Georgian rooms and left the tedious, redundant, minimalist pastiches behind.    
                                                 
Then when I was researching this rubbish, I read the blurb on the Hugh Lane about Martin’s work. I am still laughing. Here is just some of it: “Fergus Martin’s exhibition at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane draws from a new body of work in the medium of sculpture and painting united by a sense of drama and raucous reflection, the placement of which leaves the viewer in an unsettled state of calm. He has called his paintings ‘the carriers’ of colour but the colour is not restricted only to its structured composition. Mediated by the viewer's gaze, it belongs to the entirety of the world as the eye sees it, and renders it accessible.”        


All I can say is that I felt an unsettled state of anger at seeing a provincial mediocrity produce tenth rate, minimalist rip-offs, nearly forty years after the fact - and then go on to have a credible career in Ireland – exhibiting, selling and lauded in our major museums.    
                                   

Not wanting to leave the Hugh Lane on such a dull note, we revisited the newly hung permanent collection. I was delighted to see that Antonio Mancini’s Portrait of Lady Gregory was back on display. I explained to Carol how I had loved looking at this painting when bunking off from Sandymount High-School in 1988. Seeing it again after a long time, I was struck by its obvious painterly skill, but also its rawness, neurotic quality and visionary beauty. The painting was scarified by a squared-up grid - which was the result of Mancini’s use of a wire grid on his paintings - to aid the rapid execution of a portrait. It was a novel method of painting in keeping with Mancini’s eccentric approach to art. Parts of the portrait, was painting in thin washes - while highlighted areas were painted with a thick nervous impasto - creating even more peaks over the reliefs of his grid. It should not have worked – but it did. I thanked God that there were inspired painters like Mancini in art history – men and women who took risks with every brushstroke.