On Tuesday 19th April 2011, I went into
town with Carol for a jaunt around the art galleries - and to buy art materials
in M. Kennedy & Sons. In the Green on Red, we saw Autodidactic by Ronan McCrea a stupid
exhibition of photographs of children playing in a car park with coloured lines
photo-shopped around them. In the Douglas Hyde gallery, we saw an exhibition of
Shiva Linga paintings by anonymous
artists from Rajasthan in north-western India, which looked good from a
distance, but were disappointingly amateurish and repetitive when seen close
up.
In the Kerlin gallery, we saw Notes
on 14 Paintings, a beautiful and powerful new exhibition by Brian Maguire
that was better than most of the art I had seen in Chelsea months before. I was
thankful that there was still expressive painters like Maguire making vivid new
work.
In the Rubicon
gallery, we saw Tondos & Bi-Products
a charming exhibition of abstract paintings by Alexis Harding. Harding had
graduated from Goldsmiths Art College in 1995, and spent the following years
exploring abstract grid patterns which he then distressed. He painted his
abstracts in gloss paint - flat on the ground. Then when the paint skin had
dried, he would hang the paint skins allowing gravity to pull them down and
often apart – warping and buckling the grids he had created. This exhibition
contained a couple of these large and thoughtful abstracts, but it also had a
series of quick abstract oil sketches on the cardboard covers of one of his
previous exhibition catalogues - in which he experimented with shape, colour
and the material of paint. I had always had a disproportionate affection for
such painterly exercises in process and form.
Not out of any desire to emulate such a narrow application of the art of
painting - but rather for the possibilities such specialists opened up to other
painters. Carol and I loved the show, so we bought two of Harding’s catalogues.
Then we walked through St. Stephen’s Green before going to Kennedy’s and buying paints and paper.