Eoin McHugh At The Douglas Hyde Gallery

On Monday 19^th 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.

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.                                                                                                   

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.