The NGI Revisited and Reconsidered

I got up early on Thursday 27^th July 2017, and Carol and I spontaneously decided to go into town and see the newly refurbished National Gallery of Ireland. For months, beforehand - I had looked forward to seeing again all those paintings - I had grown up looking at. But I had also ruminated upon the meaning the National Gallery had for me as an artist. For six years the vast majority of the gallery had been shut down for renovation work that cost €25 million. More than a mere restoration, much of the gallery had been gutted and completely rebuilt to include new gallery spaces and vital heating and air conditioning units. During the many years of renovation of the National Gallery, I had felt like a part of me had been amputated. During my youth, my first ideas about artistic quality were shaped by the National Gallery. In my early teens, I shifted from a love of the Impressionists to the Dutch masters of the Golden Age - to the French Neo-Classists and Romantic painters all represented in varying quality in the National Gallery of Ireland.                                                                                                                         

Then at fifteen, I underwent a radical transformation of my idea of art through books on Expressionism and in particular the taboo Egon Schiele - who for decades I only knew through reproductions. My discovery of Schiele came at a vital moment in my life. Throughout all the traumatic and horrific events that I had experienced as a child - because my mother had paranoid-schizophrenia – I had practiced a stone faced look and refusal to talk to people. It had been the same in my art - which said nothing about me as a person. But by fifteen my stoic defence had started to crack and I had desperately looked to art history - for artists who had shared a similarly wounded experience of life. Looking at Expressionist painters like van Gogh, Munch and Schiele - I suddenly realised that the world did not look the same when you felt inner anguish and despair and to pretend that it did - was to lie not only to the public - but to yourself.             

Through Schiele, I also became shockingly aware of just how much of human existence and failing like our sexuality and insanity was edited out of Classical Art. Long before Hollywood was the “dream factory” – painting was the dream factory - where the great and good were idealised and immortalised and all their flaws as human beings edited out. So much so, that the idealistic images in paintings were taken to be the truth by philosophers -  yet it was actually the greatest lie ever told! At the age of fifteen through Egon Schiele, I became aware that the light represented in Western art represented only about 5% of the real universe of existence – 95% of which was made up by the invisible dark matter of existence - deemed too ugly, immoral or politically incorrect to record. But stuck in pre-internet Dublin, all these revelations came to me through foreign art books and magazines and certainly not through the National Gallery or in fact any other gallery in the hyper-censored, repressed and hypocritical Irish capital.                   

Thus, although throughout my life, I continued to visit the National Gallery and marvel at the technical skill of its painters - and wish I had anything like their work ethic, technical skill and refinement – I became antagonistically obsessed with their rank servitude to the rich and powerful, their humanitarian lies, their moral hypocrisy and their social conservatism.  

             

Unlike so many arrogant and self-congratulatory public figures – I regretted almost everything in my life. Chief amongst my regrets was my failure to achieve my childhood dream of artistic greatness. Many of the reasons I failed were a result of things outside my control. I could not help that I never received the kind of Classical atelier training I wanted as a child - and at an age when I would have accepted and been thankful of such training. So I had to teach myself by making every mistake in the book and trying to develop my own kind of virtuosity. Nor could I help that my childhood had been such an insane horror show that it would break me inside and permanently alienate me from others - and make them avoid and reject me. But I was responsible for what I chose to learn from a childhood of madness, neglect, abuse and loneliness. What I learned was that life was full of pain and darkness and I simply could not believe in - never mind recreate - the illusions of faith, truth and beauty of the Old Masters. But I could not help, that when I produced my painfully honest works – people would call me a talentless, insane, perverted maniac. Still, I knew I could never paint what or how others wanted me to. No matter how much reverence I had for the Old Masters – I knew my world had little in common with theirs not only existentially but also historically after; photography, cinema, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, radio, feminism, world war, popular culture, democracy, mass pornography and reality television.                                                                                                  

The Impressionists like Manet and Degas were the last great painters to learn and extend the lessons of the Louvre. The last great painter to try to marry the lessons of the Louvre and nature was Cézanne who famously declared that he wanted to remake nature after Poussin. But frankly if Poussin had been able to come back from the dead and was forced to meet Cézanne - he would have though he was a madman who had taken his name in vain! By 1909, Futurists like Marinetti were declaring that they wanted to destroy the museums and that “Admiring an old picture is about as much good as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn…” (F. T. Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, Le Figero, 20^th February, 1909) By the late teens of the Twentieth Century the link between contemporary art and historical western art had been completely broken and all that was left was artists like Picasso making cynical pastiches of Ingres. With the notable exceptions of painters like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, since then virtually everything produced by artists about historical art has been just that – cynical pastiche, ironic sampling or even worse socio-political hijack.                                                                                  

Mere art aside, the most important cultural change in our lifetime - and in fact since Guttenberg’s printing press in the mid fifteenth century - has been the Pandora’s box of the internet. For millennia, kings, religious leaders and heads of state had held a stranglehold over culture and censored anything they did not approve of - or was a threat to their authority. Meanwhile they commissioned painters to glorify them in their luxurious homes, write sycophantic essays about them in the press - while simultaneously censoring, imprisoning or socially ruining anyone who critiqued their authority. The last century of culture in the West could thus be seen as a slow and painful tearing down of all the idealistic lies of the Victorians and those before them - and the fight for free speech. Yet even with all the artistic and intellectual battles for free expression – those in authority still held remarkable control over culture either through direct censorship, moral condemnation, political re-education, the control of editorial boards, the restriction of patronage or the manipulation of desire through advertising. Then almost overnight, the internet demolished all the traditional editorial boards and censorship committees - and attempts to control information and ‘protect’ the vulnerable. With the internet, everyone became their own publishers including all those undesirable people - elitist culture had so vociferously banished from their palaces of art. The internet also resulted in the de facto demolishing of the centuries old elitist copyright laws which became ransacked wholesale not only by the public but more importantly by media company’s exploiting the dissemination of content without payment. Thus YouTube and PornHub - were even more culturally radical than most of the artists, novelists and philosophers of the twentieth century combined!                                                                                                                                            

Yet how many of our freedoms on the net today will be around in even fifty years’ time is open to debate - since already countless laws are being passed by governments around the world to curb internet freedoms, we are all under mass surveillance from state agencies and commercial companies and total freedom of expression has also allowed the expression of fake news and black propaganda often by state actors. So it is only a matter of time when whole wings of prisons will be full of people who just have committed virtual crimes!                                                                                          

So all things considered, in 2017, I believed even less in the Old Masters mature and static sense of style, ideals of authority, faith, reason, morality and sexual repression than I had at fifteen. In addition, I could not see the contemporary viability of the Old Master’s labour intensive machines - because why spend a year painting a huge naturalistic, historic canvas with multiple figures - when a photograph could be taken of real people in real life and blown up as glossy wall sized print - in less than a day. Or to put it another way why paint ‘history’ when CNN showed history in the making on your 50” high-definition flat-screen. That is why, I thought that if painting had any continuing viability - it was to paint what a camera couldn’t – human emotions, the psyche of the artist or visual ideas including those critical of photography, mass media and the internet. A good example of just such a contemporary painter was the Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie whose fantastically manipulated images made one question both figuration and abstraction, photography and truth and the historical and political motives of the artist.                                                                                               

Yet, even though the National Gallery had less and less importance to my own artistic development - I would often return to appreciate what our culture had lost - in the blizzard of images and information of the internet age. What we had lost as human beings was the ability to patiently meditate on the beauty of the world and understand its deeper meanings. What we had lost as artists, was belief in art as a selfless vocation that may never achieve anything in worldly terms and a reverence for craft, the development of skills and the willingness to work like a dog for art works - than may only be appreciated by a handful of people or maybe will never be appreciated at all.

              

Returning to the National Gallery to see its newly renovated sate, I was deeply impressed by the new galleries and delighted that so many people were there enjoying it too. Sixty-five percent of the people where Irish pensioners with the remaining twenty percent young people most of them tourists. If I had been younger, single and less painfully shy and socially anxious - it would have been a great place to meet young women - most of whom seemed to be from the United Nations of hot!                                                                                                                          

Even though I had been going to the National Gallery since my childhood - even I found it confusing and hard to navigate around the new galleries - which looked so different to the ones I had known! I was stunned by the beauty of Joseph Walsh’s modern ash sculpture Magnus Modus, 2017, in the new vestibule - which from a distance looked like a weightless cream ribbon, looped in the wind - but up close, revealed itself to be the most subtly twisted, ash wood with a wonderfully evocative grain. Walsh was able to do things technically with wood that had been unimaginable in the past - yet was also a supreme craftsman - which is why he deserved his place in the National Gallery and why both Carol and I were sure of his genius.

I was impressed by the restoration of Daniel Maclise’s massive canvas the Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife which was one of the most ambitious and complex, multi-figure, history paintings by an Irish artist in the nineteenth century. The painting from 1854, commemorated the first loss of Irish freedom to the Normans in 1066 who were led by Richard de Clare known as Strongbow, but it also spoke to contemporary Irish tragedies like the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 and the Irish Famine of 1845-50. Yet Maclise, who was one of the most successful artists of his day, also made large history paintings for the British Parliament.                                           

Personally, with the exception of the likes of Delacroix, I was temperamentally put off by most of these kinds of historical group scenes - because I personally hated crowds of people – and these academic machines too much the servants of propaganda, too impersonally grandiose and sinisterly elitist. Still, academic artists of the nineteenth century like Maclise had a dogged work ethic and technical command - beyond not only me - but virtually every other living painter in the debacle of Post-Art and social-media kitsch. Ironically the last painter who could have painted as ambitiously as Maclise was the East German painter Werner Tübke and his assistants, who had learned to travel back in time in their art - because their Communist culture prohibited - the freedom of the future of the capitalist West.                                                     

I was delighted to find that the National Gallery could now show many works that had previously been in storage or had not been up on the walls for years. I also enjoyed the new thematic hang of works - where for example portraits, nudes, still-life’s or landscapes - were presented together for instructive comparison. I was also heartened to see more female nudes on show than in previous years - when it seemed political correctness had banished many of them to the storeroom. Many of these nudes were like ancient versions of the cast of Love Island with stunningly beautiful bodies - but lacking any intellectual substance – doomed to be sneered at by the cognoscenti and dammed by no-fun feminists. But life would be almost unbearable without hotties. One nude in particular that I was delighted to see again was Matthew William Peters’ painting Sylvia a Courtesan. I had last seen it when I was about sixteen - when I was both turned on by it - and also astonished that it had been painted by a clergyman! Thanks to the new wall text beside it, I learned that the Georgian period, Belfast born painter Peters, had specialised in such ‘Fancy Pictures’ but later became an Anglican clergyman, concentrated on religious paintings and regretted his youthful saucy nudes!

              

Looking around at the 17^th century still-lives I came across Still Life with Musical Instruments by the so called “Master of Carpets” a virtually unknown Italian painter whose still-lives featured richly patterned carpets. And the carpet upon which the musical instruments were laid - was indeed fantastically detailed and tactile! Pausing for a rest, we sat on a bench beside Matthias Stom’s large canvas The Arrest of Christ from around 1641. Stom was a relatively unknown Caravaggisti and his painting was a version of a similar painting by Caravaggio’s from 40 years before. Although Stom’s work lacked the stupendous realism of Caravaggio I still found it a compelling, warm toned painting, with its character’s spot lit by lanterns and burning torches - even though he had mostly copied his style from Caravaggio - Stom still possessed more talent and skill than virtually anyone painting today. Which made me think that pastiche was mostly a term one should use for technically simplistic works from the late nineteenth century onward and not about the kind of advanced homages made by the likes of Stom.

             

Truly world class paintings are not just about feats of skill, they also embody new and profound ideas and ways of seeing the world. Yet, while the National Gallery of Ireland only had about a dozen world class paintings - it had dozens of paintings of real skill and sophistication that could instruct any student of the medium. In fact, so many of the ‘minor’ paintings in the National Gallery were technical marvels and totally beyond the skills or patience of painters today. Because I had recently spent so long on The Rank Prophet series which had demanded such exacting realist technique – I intimately knew just how much time and back-breaking work went into even a few inches of realist painting – so I was struck by how unfair it was to such painters for viewers to only spend only a few minutes looking at works that might have taken them months to create. It was like ‘listening’ to Beethoven by fast forwarding his symphonies on iTunes or casting pearls before swine.                                                                                                                                       

On the other hand, looking at the worst of the Modern European and Irish paintings in the National Gallery collection – I was struck by the cheek of such painters to present such technically simplistic works to the public – and even enduring a few seconds glimpse of their work was dispiriting. And even the best of such works simply made no sense in a museum of pre-mid-nineteenth century works. Yet again, I longed for the National Gallery to copy the Louvre and have a cut-off point in the mid nineteenth century and the have works from Impressionism onward exhibited in the Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane where they would make more sense amongst its more substantial Modern holdings.

              

Still, at least European Modernists like Monet, Picasso, Gris and Soutine in the National Gallery compensated for the technical crudity of their works with the originality of their ideas and the way they changed the course of Art History. The same could not be said for the ragbag of provincial Irish mediocrities like Maine Jellett or Louis le Brocquy. The only virtue of such technically brutish Modern Irish painting, with its litany of pastiched Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, Art Informal and Pop Art - was its supposed originality of ideas and authenticity of feeling – except their copycat ideas were stolen from abroad and their feelings were merely bad playacting. Frankly, I had more time for the backward Sean Keating’s social realism which seemed at least authentically rooted in Irish life and politics at the time. Keating may have been a conservative reactionary but the likes of Jellett and le Brocquy were frauds who had toured Europe and brought other men’s ideas back as their own.                                                                                                  

While wandering around the room of the Modern paintings, I also discovered that the National Gallery had acquired a Max Pechstein painting of fishermen from 1920. In the early years of Expressionism, Pechstein had been the most successful of the Die Brücke painters because of his slick skills but his authenticity had always been suspect and his reputation had massively declined since his heyday. The relatively late Pechstein painting in the National Gallery - was the kind of Expressionism as fashion statement - that gave Expressionism a bad name. It was worse than many paintings by the decades late to the party Irish Expressionist Michael Kane.                                                                        

              

Yet again I was incensed by the politically correct highlighting of the likes of Evie Hone whose ham-fisted, pseudo-Expressionist stain glass in the service of the Catholic Church (!) - was disgracefully placed alongside a real genius like Harry Clarke. It was just to keep feminist viragos happy - I suppose. The problem was, that by murdering for politically-correct reasons any understanding of talent, quality, originality or the Canon for the sake of identity politics and “representation”– they were not only presenting token talentless women with a prize they did not deserve. They were also decimating the credibility of the modern Canon and not just for nasty, white, male geniuses but for numerous female artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker, Alice Neel, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois or Paula Rego or Tracey Emin who deserved to be thought of as great modern artists.

              

In the National Portrait Collection, I saw my first Colin Davidson painting in the flesh a portrait of the poet Michael Longley. I had watched Davidson’s career for a few years and thought he was one of the most interesting and talented painters working in Ireland. Davidson’s paintings were like Abstract-Expressionist versions of Lucian Freud - and seeing his painting in the flesh - I was even more impressed by his talent. On the other hand, I thought Davidson who seemed to produce countless portraits of the rich and famous - was in danger of becoming just another sycophantic, money-driven, Neo-Society portrait painter. I was also very impressed by Geraldine O'Neill’s large portrait of John Rocha from 2015. O'Neill’s figurative talent and skill as well as her technical command was self-evident in this portrait of the Irish designer. But I also wondered at the point of such a traditional view of the world - that did not seem to think that much had happened since the Old Masters. So all in all, I thought it a doubly smug work that represented the self-indulgence of both designer and painter. Donald Trump would have loved to be painted by Geraldine O'Neill’s! Looking again at the likes of Louis le Brocquy, Robert Ballagh and James Hanley none of who had the talent or skill of Davidson or O’Neill - I was struck not by how mediocre and conformist their work was (which it was) but how successfully they had engineered successful provincial careers for themselves, through self-censoring super-egos, hard work, relentless operating, public relations, diplomacy and a complete lack of rebellion or whiff of madness.                                                  

The art world loved to project the idea of freedom art – it lubricated their decadence. The art world loved to project the idea of artists as rebels – it made them money. But Art History teaches the exact opposite. For every Caravaggio, Goya, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Scheile, Artaud or Basquiat there were literally thousands of conformists who merely parroted the clichés of artistic fashion and politics. Even in supposedly rebellious cities like Paris, New York or London where occasionally true artistic rebels succeeded –  success at least in the short term - was usually only granted to charming and neutered mediocrities who worked their way up the greasy pole. But in the tiny Irish art world (where there was a total lack of funny money, shopaholic collectors, media sensationalists or a bohemian culture of intellectual provocateurs that could birth rebellious prodigies) there wasn’t even the odd success of a true rebel. In the incestuous Irish art world, there really was only one kind of success, and that was only granted to conformists. In Ireland, there never had been - nor maybe ever would be - a creative youth movement like Romanticism, Expressionism, Punk or the yBas. Because our creative youth were constantly forced to emigrate – leaving our culture permanently mature even geriatric - in its intellectual conformism and socially conservative stagnation. The Irish middle-classes were appalled by the insanity and decadence of people in megacities like London and New York – but it was those kinds of crazy environments that also produced ground-breaking geniuses. Our true creative rebels were buried in foreign lands or in unmarked graves outside our lunatic asylums. Still, despite the conformist dross of most Irish Modern and contemporary art a few figures stood out as at least formally exceptional like Harry Clarke, William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Jack B. Yeats, Michael Farrell, Brian Maguire, Patrick Graham, Dorothy Cross and more recently Aideen Barry, Joseph Walsh, Colin Davidson and Geraldine O'Neill who all promised greatness - though how their work would develop was still to be seen.

              

After spending three and a half-hours looking around the National Gallery and still having not having seen everything we decided to call it day. Despite the beauty of the new National Gallery and my good mood – I could not help feeling - when looking at so many excellently painted works by the Old Masters and even minor masters - that I might as well as go home and throw my paints and brushes and most of my lifework in a skip! These Old Masters and even journeymen had a such an extraordinary work ethic, technical proficiency, intellectual gravity and frankly sanity - that put to shame not only me but most artists since Impressionism. 

Lucian Freud: Levitating Above the Waste Ground of Contemporary Art

''What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.''

Lucian Freud.

On a freezing Saturday 11^TH February, as it poured rain, my brother and sister brought us out in their car to IMMA to see the Freud Project 2016-2021, an exhibition of thirty oil paintings, nineteen etchings and one early drawing by the English master who had died in 2011. The Project had opened in October, but since I wasn’t getting up until 2pm every day, it gave me little time to go all the way over to IMMA and I felt too depressed and worn out to bother. So I was very thankful that my brother and sister had brought us over.                                             

In the mid 1950’s Freud was dubbed the “Ingres of Existentialism” by the excellent English art historian and writer Herbert Read. Later in 1993, he was hailed by the superb critic Robert Hughes as “the best realist painter alive”. Yet others who should have supported Freud (because he was trying to preserve realist painting) like Brian Sewell could only see Freud as a giant amongst the pigmies of contemporary painting and embarrassingly bad compared to the Old Masters. In 2008, Freud’s oil painting The Benefits Supervisor from 1995 of the voluptuous Sue Tilley sold for $33.6 million, the highest price for a work by a living artist at the time. Yet in the sixties and seventies he had been largely ignored by an art establishment enthralled by Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism. Having had such a long life, Freud also had a number of different stylistic periods - though each grew naturally and slowly out of the others and as his skills increased so did the ambitiousness of his paintings. With his hawkish good looks and wild sexuality, Freud was only married twice but he had around 500 other female lovers - many of them from the British upper classes. He also had over fourteen children (that we know of) with different women. He loathed the bourgeoisie (even though his own background was completely bourgeois), but mixed freely with both aristocrats, low lives and criminals. Later in life he had over three different studios and told only his models and lovers which one he was in. Few knew his phone number and the press had to try and make contact with him through his agent or solicitor. He hated filling out forms and never voted because he was so paranoid about being traceable. Yet although Freud disliked the media world, he was a skilled operator amongst rich patrons and collectors and older and conservative curators and critics. We would never have heard of him at all if he hadn’t been! He was friends with fellow painters like Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff who became known as The School of London. In the 1950’s he was a frequent visitor to Ireland and had many Irish friends and models, it is said that he liked the wildness of Dublin life.

             

Freud had been one of my heroes since the early 1990s.  Still, I had mixed feelings about the Freud Project 2016-2021 at IMMA which was being housed in a specially adapted building outside the main museum courtyard. I found it highly ironic that a painter who had been marginalised since the 1960’s by curators more interested in Pop art and Conceptualism was being used to help the flagging fortunes of IMMA whose Post-Art, progressive, pointless academic Conceptualism was not making Dublin people trek out in their masses to Kilmainham. Incredibly in 1989, Freud was shortlisted for the Turner Prize – but the prize went to the completely talentless Richard Long with his pathetic and pretentious, Neo-Stone-Age collections of sticks and stones and walking interventions in the landscape! Just another incident - to add to my endless list of how contemporary art - is a laughable and ultimately tragic joke.                                                                                            

To the kind of faddish hipsters who like to strike the pose of artist, and try to compensate for their complete lack of talent, by a liberal use of art jabberwocky and clickbait ideas – an exhibition like the Freud Project - must have been like a slap in the face of their pretentious posing. But to any student of art history over the long-term and interested in the skills and craft of painting it was a Godsend and I was delighted to see young female students drawing from the paintings and etchings. To come up with some faddish novelty - has never impressed me - even if it is the kind of thing philistines love - because it is as dumb and direct as an infomercial on TV. No, to me the greatest achievement in art, is to take what history and tradition has given you and reinventing it! That is what Freud did brilliantly with the ancient genres of the portrait, nude and nature study. For me at least, it was the most inspiring exhibition I had seen in Dublin since the last Freud exhibition in IMMA in 2007. Unlike Francis Bacon - whose art was utterly inimitable - because you ended up looking like a stupid, adolescent, student preforming an act of ventriloquism - Freud offered real inspiration one could use (in part) in your own work. It was like the way Pollock was a greater artist than de Kooning, but if you copied Pollock you only ended up looking like a fraud - whereas there were parts of de Kooning’s art you could develop with less risk of being called out on it - so de Kooning had far more acolytes.                                                                                                                                   

                

Freud’s life and work was a total rebuke to all the progressive crap foisted upon us since the 1960s. However, his work was also - a total rebuke to the swarms of professional, charmingly mediocre, figurative painters like Tai Shan Schierenberg and Jonathan Yeo - who each year created an avalanche of dumb, kitsch, slap-dash work. What all their work lacked was the years of sheer graft of Freud and his incredible integrity and intensity of vision. Intensity is something you cannot fake and only the greatest painters have it. It requires more than mere talent, personality or posturing – it requires constant hard work over decades and if you are lucky you will have a few key moments of extreme vision - brought on by events in your life or through a specially blessed creative period or obsession with a particular subject. Freud’s most intense works included some of his self-portraits, his paintings of his mother, lovers, daughters naked, some of his male and female nudes, his naked portraits of Leigh Bowery and Sue Tilley, a painting of waste ground and houses seen from his studio window and a couple of his paintings of plants and foliage. Sadly, only some of these works were included in this exhibition.  

               

One of the reason I had stopped going to exhibitions in Dublin, was I was sick to death of going to see facile, eager to please, politically-correct exhibitions (especially of artists even younger than me) in galleries and museums - that had rejected my work repeatedly with brusque distain and contempt - while they fawned over charming mediocrity. By my middle forties, it had finally dawned on me that I had been destroyed not by conservatives or religious zealots but by effete aesthetic idealists, feminist viragos and so called liberals who refused to give my art a platform or the oxygen of publicity.                                                                                                                                                              

More broadly, I had become sick to death of the art world which had turned rebellious liberalism into a new form of censorious moralism, politically-correct re-education and virtue signalling – as dogmatic as the old right-wing orthodoxy - the avant-garde had rebelled against. So since most of my heroes like Lucian Freud, were anti-heroes and even rather unpleasant people by most people’s standards, I preferred the language of failure to the assertions of positive-thinking, my work denied the possibility of changing the human condition, I saw many virtues in tradition, I was honest about my own and male desire, and refused to conform to the limited world view of people of this particular era – so I was doomed to speak a visual language no one understood - never mind liked. I also realised that success in the art world today - had nothing to do with talent, hard work, dedication, sacrifice or originality – it had to do with what would sell and what would confirm the fads, prejudices, socio-politics and morals of art world insiders. To succeed in the art world - you had to slowly work your way up the greasy pole - but they had dragged me off before I could barely begin – and now I realised I didn’t even want any part in such a phoney world. Moreover, art itself, which I had foolishly thought could embrace even the darkest aspects of human existence - and make them comprehensible and even beautiful - was mostly just escapist nonsense or obscure, progressive, academic pretension. However, I did not mind Freud, or anyone else of his quality, having a museum to himself - or blocking my path. After you Mr Freud!                                             

            

The Freud Projects version of Freud, was U rated with few of the contentious female nudes and none of the male nudes that had such an impact on me as a youth. Instead, it concentrated on his portraits, though since my interest in Freud wasn’t prurient (and found his nudes totally asexual) and I was more interested in his craft - it did not bother me. I found the Freud exhibition a curate’s egg of an exhibition, of the highest order in parts, impressive in others but dreadfully botched and overworked in others. Freud had been a constant source of inspiration to me since 1990, and he was one of the few artists I went back to time and time again. I adored Freud’s selfish devotion to his art, his refusal to bow to anyone, his solitary nature, his reclusiveness and unwillingness to participate in the modern worlds media circus - but he was also a sociable man - who simply insisted on secrecy from his friends and models.  I am sure that a regular surreptitious museum goer like Freud knew, that in the end the paintings would have to live and die by their power on the wall - rather than any theatrics on television or in newspaper gossip columns.  It was as wisdom sadly lacking in the likes of the yBa’s.                                  

              

I found it interesting the way Freud developed. He was no child prodigy but he made a virtue of his artistic naivety and forceful vision in his early paintings. As a youth, I think it was his personality and potential that impressed art world insiders - more than his actual work. Though the fact that he was a wild, attractive boy - helped amongst the gay mafia of the London art world. His early paintings were coagulated, exaggerated and caricatured paintings of people often in strange landscapes. This morphed into a more Surrealist inspired laconic style and then a more finely painted and highly finished style that owed something to both Surrealism and German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painting - though Freud never gave German art any credit in interviews - which was not surprising given the destruction and slaughter the Germans had inflicted upon Europe and their industrial annihilation of the Jews. Speaking later of his brief surreal period, Freud declared that: “I think Lautréamont’s umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table was an unnecessarily elaborate encounter. What could be more surreal than a nose between two eyes!” After befriending Francis Bacon with whom he shared a love of Soho nightlife and gambling, Freud changed his style again, developing a broader more expressive painting and famously switching from fine sable brushes to rougher hogs hair brushes, and in 1975 took to using Cremnitz white a very heavy, lead white paint – that suited impasto and whose granular quality he thought brought flesh to life. Although his work lost the superfine detail and polish of his previous work, he still retained an acute eye for detail in his work so that almost the best thing about a painting like Two Irishmen in W11, from 1984-85, was the window in the background through which we could see an incredibly detailed - yet painterly - transcription of the street outside Freud’s studio. Bacon also influenced Freud to distort the shapes and planes of his sitters faces in new and unexpected ways which he then translated into his figures too.                    

            

For me the greatest period of Freud’s work was from the early 1960s until the late 1990s. It is in these paintings that Freud’s full arsenal of skills - which he had been developing slowly for decades - came into play in increasingly meaty works of oil paint. From the 1980s onward his work became more and more expressionist in colour and handling at least when seen close up. Freud understood what Eugène Delacroix had noted and written about in his journals many times, namely, that seen from a distance in a gallery - even the largest paintings can take on a grey appearance. Which is why painters like Tintoretto, Rubens and Delacroix had developed a more open brushwork and vivid use of colour than earlier painters - so that when seen from a distance their canvases still had impact.                                                                                      

             

From the 1990s Freud’s figure paintings became more theatrical and complex featuring multiple figures, sometimes it worked - but sadly in others it could look ludicrous. When Freud attempted to construct a narrative or use symbolism it usually looked absurd and unbelievable, perhaps the only exception being his multiple portraits of extended family in Large Interior (After Watteau) from 1981-83. By the noughties paintings of a naked pregnant Kate Moss, naked pregnant Jerry Hall and the Queen were so mediocre you could have found better paintings by a third year student in any local art college. But by now, Freud was so rich, famous and revered - that anything he painted was thought a work of genius. Sadly, most of Freud’s last work in the noughties apart from a few notable exceptions, did not end on a high like late Titian, Rembrant or Goya. Freud’s work became wonky, hesitant, fumbling and overworked - until some of the canvases looked like they had broken out in into field of coloured pimples. These late pimply paintings that unintentionally verged on the pointillist - reminded me of the painting of the beautiful Gillette that Frenhofer showed to Poussin and Porbus in Honoré de Balzac’s story Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu and which was just a mess of colours save for a foot. It was clear to me that by the end, Freud’s vision, touch, stamina and decision making was impaired.                                            

           

Throughout his career, it appeared that there was a battle of heart and soul going on within Freud’s paintings between his German background and adopted English homeland or between German proto-Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit realism and English Romanticism and Realism. Freud disliked talking about influences and those he mentioned like Hals, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Chardin, Watteau, Courbet, Constable and Degas were perhaps less important that those he did not mention like beastly Germans like Dürer. And it can be no accident that his work looks so similar to German painters that were famous when he lived in Berlin as a little boy - like Lovis Corinth and Christian Schad. As the Jesuits say, "Give me a child for his first seven years and I'll give you the man". And Freud only left Berlin at the age of eleven. Freud despised the English painter Stanley Spencer - but Spencer’s naked portrait of himself and his wife Preece in Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife from 1937 - foreshadowed Freud’s mature nudes.                                                  

           

When conservative critics like Andrew Graham-Dixon and Brian Sewell found fundamental faults in Freud’s drawing and painting of the figure and their surroundings and found him wanting compared with the Old Masters - I think they were being totally unfair. As a realist painter, Freud was almost totally self-taught. In fact, his early training by the likes of Cedric Morris who encouraged his students to exaggerate reality and distort features was actually counter-productive to a solid realist foundation. Lucian Freud fully illustrated - the plight of so many realist painters at the end of the twentieth century in the West - who wanted to compete with the Old Masters in figurative art - but have never had the rigorous, ten years of old academic training necessary to achieve it because such training had been dismantled by a Modernist wreaking-ball in the name of novelty, personal expression and democratic incompetence. So, self-taught as a realist painter, Freud acquired bad habits of drawing and painting - that he struggled for years to transcend - and some of them he never did.                                     

             

Besides the age of Freud, after photography, cinema, mass media, the death of God, the holocaust, Existentialism and the constant pollution of war, atrocity, crime and exhibitionistic drama that bombarded people daily through the media – had destroyed peoples ancient sense of time and purpose, idealism and faith in humanity. In his studio, Freud fought an existential battle to maintain some of the old meanings - against the circus of much of Modern art, the bankruptcy of painting, the rise of impersonal mass media and our increasingly atomised lives. Most perversely of all, for such a solitary rebel – Freud fought to maintain intimate contact with his subjects in an age when most figurative painters like Warhol, Richter or Tuymans were painting from second images of people, events and things they had never personally known or experienced. As a rebel and contrarian, Freud revelled in painting in a way that had been deemed outdated, bankrupt and reactionary by Modernism and the anti-painting school of Duchamp. Freud also clearly became addicted to the challenges of figurative painting - finding constant inspiration in a reality others could no longer see never mind understand. So dramatic was Freud’s reinvention of figurative painting - that he almost singlehandedly - made us recall the sheer magic and intoxication of painting - that tries to conjure up the world around us in coloured pigments and oil on cloth.

              

Some may have found Freud’s treatment of his sitters unflattering, embarrassing and anxiety inducing but they missed the point. To render people in some air-brushed photographic manner was pointless when the camera could do it better. Freud brought something unique to the portrait through endless attention, the accumulation of time and the intensity of his scrutiny. There were many reasons why Freud was such a dispassionate observer of the world, his poor early relationship with his domineering mother who he tried to escape, the influence of his Grandfather Sigmund which may have taught him not to reveal that much about himself - and the power of being the one asking the questions, his early childhood in a Germanic culture and the stoicism that was necessary during the horrors of the Second World War.                   

Some people seem to think it is very important who the sitters were in Freud’s paintings. I think it is almost irrelevant. So what if they were of himself, or his lovers, or they there was his daughters clothed and nude, a boxer, a doctor, an art critic, a drag performer and so on. So what if they were straight or gay, male or female. I think that was Freud’s attitude too. He was interested in painting flesh not identity. His work was a compendium of the human animal at the end of the twentieth century - no more important than his whippets that often lay near his models or his paintings of horses, bats, rats, foliage, flowers, sinks or buildings, or a rubbish tip outside his studio. Going around the exhibition looking for human interest stories is completely beyond the point and confuses art with sentimental gossip. So I completely understood Freud’s preference for titles like Head of a Man or Naked Portrait. Thus in many ways Freud’s paintings were a refutation of his grandfather who wanted his clients to unburden all the drama of their life on to him. Lucian on the other hand - seemed to believe that the face and the body told their own story in much the way physiognomists used to just before Lucian’s birth. Of course it was also a perfectly natural approach for a painter - though seemingly impossible for those who do not live through their eyes - to understand.                                                                        

I have read a lot of rubbish about Freud and listened to a lot of blather and bitching from effete, middle-class, television commentators who wouldn’t even know how to mix a skin tone on a pallet. Typically, since they know virtually nothing about art - except what they like and don’t like - they take it as their role to pontificate on character, psychology, morality and socio-politics. They should get off the bog! Socialists with their politics of envy - loathed Freud’s conservativism, his interactions with the aristocracy and his elitist talent for painting - the ultimate capitalist commodity. But just look back to history to see the miserable crap we would have to live with under socialists! Feminists like Linda Nochlin and Germaine Greer perversely took a real dislike to Freud which I have always found illuminating. Feminists from the 1970s onward had carped about the objectification of women, the unrealistic images - women had to aspire to in magazines and on television, and men’s cruel sexualisation of women. But then Freud came along and painted women like pagan idols of flesh and made even ordinary or overweight women look strangely fantastic - but not in the obvious ways of fashion photography or soft-core porn. Yet Feminists carped about Freud’s unflattering, unpleasant and meaty representations of women! Make up your fucking mind Feminists! Then perversely, years later Jenny Saville came along and female critics wet themselves praising the brilliance of Saville’s early paintings which were a weak, overblown pastiche of Freud - done with house-painters brushes – and with some feminist, fat pride, aggro thrown in! And you wonder why I am sick to death of the art world!                                                                                                                                                                            

Which reminded me of the way, I too, had been demonised by art world insiders and Feminists for producing pornographic images, yet when years later, cynical imposters like Marlena Dumas, Cecile Brown, Tracey Emin, Chantal Joffe and Rita Ackermann amongst many others produced ventriloquist porn paintings without desire (sometimes from the very images I had used years before), they were snapped up by the very galleries that had dismissed me as an insane pervert. They then, went on to exhibit in museums that had been just as contemptuous towards me. Then I had to read critics praise these female artists as so original, courageous, sexy and brilliant! True their versions of porn were pathetic, scrambled, feminised, prettified and impersonal - compared to my more anguished, honest and hardcore versions! So maybe you can understand why - I had gone way past being defiant or bitter towards the art world - to being completely revolted by it!

                                                                                      

Feminists aside, it has always struck me how perversely and contradictory people talk about the body especially when most of our bodies are so inadequate for Olympus. Women in particular seem to be the worst body fascists when it comes to looking at other women in particular - which they have a ruthless skill in denigrating - and do it so often it is hardly even noticed. Though it is a sign of the decadence of our culture that today, that there are also plenty of vain gym himbos who also judge people by their bodies and think their useless fake-tanned muscles - which they have devoted all their spare time developing, have any meaning in a war free, technological, post-modern world - yet there are plenty of reactionary bimbos who go weak at the knees for them.  

            

But in general, there really seems to be some serious body blindness and delusional thinking in even normal people - to think that they look nothing like a Freud nude male or female under electric light - but probably look more like a glamorously lit, movie star in the nip in front of a camera with a soft-focus filter! It was that kind of egotistical and fanciful thinking that Freud’s work ruthlessly exposed and which any visit to a hospital and brief look at the random, tragic bodies of the people there under strip lights confirms. Freud’s naked portraits are not only nude - but also stripped of their false social selves and left stranded in the existential no-mans-land of his studio. Freud’s nudes may not be the ultimate truth of the body in painting – since every great painter reinvents it -  but they are certainly one the most original versions of the body in art.                                                                                                                                                                                

People liked to say that Freud’s work had little emotional warmth or humanity – in other words it was not a cliché, progressive, sentimental, kitsch, or glossy idealisation of the world. Well, that is why I adored his work! Freud’s work dealt in far more complex, ambiguous and subtle emotions than mere admiration, desire, fantasy, lust, love or hate.                                                                                                                                                                    

It is true that Freud’s relationships with people could be selfish, demanding, manipulative, combative, cold and even sinister but his love of animals was serious and deeply respectful - but again not in the kind of kitsch, cute ways people love seeing in their Facebook timeline. Freud gave animals a gravity and dignity far above most of that kind of manipulative stuff.                                                                                                                                                     

What was rare in Freud’s work was bravura shorthand or flourishes with the paintbrush like virtuosos like Velázquez, Hals, Sargent or de Kooning. That kind of extrovert theatrics - did not suit his guarded and meticulous temperament. Instead, every inch of his canvases were worked and reworked until they had a titanic heft. And in Freud’s work there was none of the stupid, slavish, karaoke copying of photographs that has become such a plague in painting since the 60s. No, every inch of Freud’s paintings - no matter how realistic - always retained the weight of painting, personal touch and conviction.                              

For people who have never drawn or painted from life, the subject of the life-room is a cause for puerile comedy and smutty jokes. As both a painter of hardcore porn and painter from nude models now and then - I can attest, that I have never painted with a hard-on or rarely even aroused – there is too much work to be done and it is so difficult and all consuming. Moreover, the elation one feels when a painting is going well - is better than sex. Likewise, Freud thought you could not do two different things at the same time. For Freud, nakedness was not a subject to be ashamed of – never mind sexual - which is why neither he nor his daughters had any problem with him painting them naked.                                                              

            

For many of us, our first encounter with skin tone was through a Crayola crayon and I am still shocked that today, reputable artist quality, paint brands, produce skin tone paint! Skin tone in these various forms are just a warm peach. They are utterly ludicrous, because even if you tone them down with blue paint - you still end up with a blow-up doll of a figure. That’s fine if you are a Pop artist making an ironic comment on commercial, vacuous, fantasy culture - but laughable for a serious artist. Freud graphically showed - just how many colours one could see in flesh - if you looked hard enough! Freud’s flesh colours up-close, included muted, dirty or strident; yellows, oranges, reds, crimsons, greens, olives, purples, lilacs and blues as well as ochres, browns and greys. Freud’s paintings told the story of flesh in all its peculiarities of wrinkles, fat, bone, hairs, veins, pimples, freckles, moles, scars, stretch-marks, sunburn and dirt – but in a subtle and fantastically beautiful way - unlike a dreadfully kitsch, horror painter like Ivan Albright.   

              

To many who had never painted in their life, and knew nothing about painting, Freud’s paintings were monochromatic or just a series of ochres, greys, browns and dirty greens. They obviously had never looked closely at his work in the flesh, or just passed them in a drunk, gossipy miasma at an opening, or just couldn’t see or worse still had become so brainwashed by the kind of avant-garde colour clichés promulgated from Fauvism to Pop - that if your painting wasn’t a billboard of just two or three primary or contrasting colours - then you had no sense of colour!

             

Personally, I adored the way Freud really went for it in his paintings, putting colours you would never expect to work in the flesh tones, clothes and backgrounds. And his rendering of whites, was masterful because the painting of anything white like walls, sheets or cloth was one of the greatest tests of a painter’s ability. Freud’s whites had a kaleidoscope of very pale yellows, blues, red, greens, purples and greys inflected in them and only the highlights were pure white. There was never anything slack or lazy in Freud’s greatest canvases. Every feature, form of clothing, chair or wall had its own weight and texture. He could even make even a man’s suit - take on epic in import. Largely self-taught as a figurative painter, Freud developed his own idiosyncratic way for hatching and knitting the paint through his brushstrokes. Freud usually started his paintings by sketching in the figures in charcoal and then concentrated on the face and worked outwards - and some of his late unfinished canvases confirmed this. They also showed that in his late paintings he started off from the start - putting down unnaturalistic colours and perhaps only toned them down later.                                                                           

              

Unlike many painters today, Freud did not paint big canvases just for the sake of it and some of his best work was no bigger than an iPad or even an iPhone. There were some tiny canvases in the exhibition that were miniature masterpieces - yet still very painterly and impastoed. I had not been a fan of Freud’s etchings before but this selection of etchings completely won me over to their brilliance. Even in his etchings, Freud was obsessive and incredibly hardworking.                                         

              

After the exhibition, my brother went to bring us to dinner in The Independent Pizza Company but they were all booked up because of a GAA match in Croke Park. So eventually after trying a few other restaurants which were also fully booked up - we went to McDonalds - which I loved. Carol observed that I was always happy in McDonalds with my Big Mac meal! I may have been a snob about art but not about food!

Ten Leonardo da Vinci Drawings at The National Gallery of Ireland

On Thursday 9^th June 2016, Carol and I went into the National Gallery of Ireland to see ten drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from the British Royal Collection. Dublin was bathed in the golden light of dusk in late spring and the women on the streets seemed to glow with fecundity though none more so than a beautiful, slender, auburn haired, golden tanned, pregnant woman in a bright pale blue sun dress and with flip-flops - I saw passing outside the National Gallery.                                                                                                      
                        

I had not ventured out to see an exhibition in about four months and I was frankly sick to death of contemporary art and saw no point in frustrating and angering myself anymore with the trivial, commercial and eager to please crap of my peers and wondered why anyone still wanted to make or write about art. Art for me had ended in 1985 when Neo-Expressionism stopped being the major movement of the day and Neo-Geo took its place. I simply did not give a dam about the zillions of pastiches and rehashes of style done with such a waste of materials and human energy since 1985 and whose only merit was commercial, moralistic or as the embodiment of identity politics. I could not identify with an art world that had turned from an arena of truthful, personal, freedom of expression - regardless of the personal cost - into a gilded cage populated by extreme left-wing and Feminist moralisers who schizophrenically also hung around art galleries and private member’s clubs trying to sell their art to corporate billionaires. I was now just a highly informed philistine and carried on with my own art because it was the only thing that kept me sane. Moreover, as a middle-aged artist, I had long since stopped being influenced by other artists and had come to realise that no one could help me in the midst of my painting - than myself. In fact, I had to think hard to think of the last exhibition that had actually inspired or aided my own work. But I really would have a been a philistine - if I had passed up the opportunity to see drawings by da Vinci! And as it turned out, this was to be one of the most inspiring exhibitions I had seen in a long time.                                            

I had glanced at the drawings on the National Gallery website and was struck by how introverted and lacking in bravura flashiness they were but I hoped that in the flesh they would have more impact. Seeing them in the dimly lit gallery space was thus a revelation. Da Vinci’s drawing were on thin sheets of paper mostly no bigger than postcards and I had to peer to see all their details. What I saw in the flesh was a grandeur of vision on a small scale - I had never witnessed in any other artist. Only Dürer came close to da Vinci’s power as a draughtsman on a small scale. The paper da Vinci used was made of cotton rag, hot pressed and no more than 90lb in weight. The paper was so thin that one could see the marks from the verso of the sheets - which he frequently made use of on both sides. Those sheets that had drawings on both sides were exhibited in double sided glass frames which one could walk around. The exhibition started with a short and succinct video demonstrating the materials and techniques of da Vinci the draughtsman. As you know, I loathe video pieces of any kind in exhibitions, but as a technical geek, I found it highly informative and loved hearing about the materials da Vinci used.                                     
                           

You know one of the reasons, I got an E in my first ever essay on art in Art College at the age of eighteen, was because it was on Picasso’s Les Demoiselle d’Avignon and since I had never seen it in the flesh - I found it almost impossible to write about. I still haven’t seen Les Demoiselle d’Avignon and I still don’t feel fit to write about it. I was nineteen then and even now at forty-five - I find it as hard to write about art works I have never seen. Seeing da Vinci’s drawings in low resolution JPGs on the National Gallery website gave me little idea of the material quality of the drawings in the flesh. Even when I went home and looked at the drawings in high resolution photographs in various books on da Vinci at home - I found the experience strangely detached. But in the gallery, where I had to navigate other viewers, peer into the glass frames under dim light and strain to see all the fine details of da Vinci’s line - it was a full erotic experience.                                                                              
                                                      
The last time I had a chance to see da Vinci drawings was in 2007, in the Chester Betty Gallery, but I had come away from that very frustrated and disappointed. The Codex Leicester, actually contained no standalone drawings, and those on the margins of The Codex Leicester were restricted to water and engineering - a subject I had no interest in and even if I did, I did not speak Latin and did not have a mirror to reverse da Vinci’s famously reversed writing. So it was a relief to finally see drawings of real impact in this exhibition. The ten drawings captured some of da Vinci’s chief interests, a female portrait with da Vinci’s much copied enigmatic and benign smile, a study of blackberry bush, study of river water damage on an embankment, studies for horses, studies of cats and one drawing of from a series of ten about a deluge which reflected da Vinci’s pessimistic fascination with the end of the world. There was nothing narcissistically flashy or extravagant about these drawings. In fact, they seemed incredibly private and introverted works made for da Vinci’s own pleasure and understanding. They convinced slowly and devastatingly.                                                                                                                                  

The great criticism of da Vinci, was that he had so many ideas - but realised too few of his projects. That is of course true, which is why it is his drawings that are arguably his greatest achievement, because it is in them that we witness his encyclopaedic interest in the natural world and plans for his many inventions. Today, these are prized almost as conceptual statements worthy in their own right - irrespective of whether or not he actually ever carried them to fulfilment - and in fact a sketch by da Vinci is often more important and profound than whole frescoed rooms by his technically skilled and hardworking but dim witted peers. Not only was da Vinci an incomparable genius at the start of the Renaissance - he was a genius with an open arena to play in - and you can see the pleasure and intensity of experience he brought to all his studies. He was like Columbus discovering America - or more recently Steve Jobs at the start of the personal computer age – with limitless room for discovery and an unassailable right to call himself the first and best - before many. Moreover, da Vinci’s omnivorous intellect and knowledge meant that everything he drew no matter how humble - was freighted with such an intensity of scrutiny and understanding - that he could make even a few branches from a blackberry bush seem epic in import.                                                            

The last great artist to bring such fresh intensity to the sketchbook from life, was the teenage Pablo Picasso in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, even though I have always considered drawing from life a vital part of one’s training, I have always had my doubts about the practice of students today being told to go out into nature and the city - to draw life - because so much of our real lives today are experienced through mediated images - that drawing from nature and physical human life - is actually unnatural and a hopelessly nostalgic, escapist fantasy. Scurrying out on expeditions into the real world - to do drawings from life today - is about as cliché, retrograde and mendacious as the nature poems of ‘poets’ living in tower blocks surrounded by digital screens, listening to Beethoven on their iPhones. In this Post-Modern world, real life only happens - when there is a power cut – and we don’t enjoy it!                             

Unlike like so many artists since the invention of photography and the cult of Impressionism, da Vinci’s drawings, did not superficially record the fall of light on bodies or objects – instead they recorded both the inner and outer structure of forms - and tried to find the source of their life. His vision of the body and nature was thus not of the fleeting and subjective but rather of the timeless and ordered. Moreover, da Vinci’s drawings proved that not only was he a great draughtsman working from life - but even more importantly - he was a great draughtsman working from his memory and imagination. Take for example his sheet of drawings of cats which are all perfectly realised in all kinds of rest, motion and fight. I have drawn periodically my cats and know that even when asleep they rarely stay still! So to draw them from life when they are resting is difficult enough - but almost impossible when moving. So da Vinci’s drawings of cats were as much about his almost photographic memory and knowledge of their anatomy as mere observation. Likewise, in the final drawing of a deluge, we see da Vinci’s knowledge and imagination create an image beyond mere appearances that may have been incorrect in minor details but overall - was epic in it cataclysmic vision of nature.                                                                                                          

For me da Vinci is the greatest draughtsman in art history because of the vastness of his range and subject matter - with only Dürer coming close to him. He continues to be an influence on young artists and Jean Michel Basquait for example was obsessed with reworking, blowing up and roughing up da Vinci’s drawings - particularly those related to anatomy. Da Vinci’s humble drawings for me were like a blessed liberation from the tyranny of the Post-Modern Neo-Salon artists of today like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and countless other rich nobodies who try to cow their peers with vast projects executed by teams of hired underlings, skilful failed artists, technicians and factory workers. You could frankly pile up all the tonnes of ‘art’ produced by most of these Post-Modern, Neo-Salon Robber Barons and it would not mean a fraction of what a tiny, feather weight drawing by da Vinci means - not only to me - but to Art History. That is why da Vinci is so inspiring - he offers no excuses to the young artist. So you can’t afford to hire thirty lackey painters to paint vast oil on linen photo-realist confections or fifty foundry workers to take a toy you found in a Poundshop and turn it into a ten-ton bronze? So you can’t even afford a small canvas and oil paint? Surely you can afford a sheet of paper and a stick of black chalk? Let’s see what you can do with that! And if you do paint - just paint twelve small and medium sized - timeless masterpieces!

Jonathan Yeo: The Schizophrenic Neo-Society Painter

On Thursday 19^th September 2013, Carol and I watched a documentary on Jonathan Yeo who was incredibly being given an exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London. I frankly seethed with contempt for Yeo’s illustrative and mannered kitsch portraits. I noticed, that almost as an aside, we saw Yeo take photographs of his sitters even though he then went on to make a show of painting them from life. Yet his finished work looked more the product of the camera than real study from life. Carol pointedly compared Yeo’s style to the illustrations in Woman’s Way in the 1980’s. I thought his paintings said virtually nothing about Yeo’s sitters and the only thing they said about Yeo was his taste in illustrative artists which he pastiched. There was no there - there, in Yeo’s work which was superficial and devoid of spirit. I found his rendering of faces boring and lacking any real psychological depth and his scrubbed and splattered backgrounds offensively mannered. Another small, technical, studio related reason I hated Yeo, was my disgust at his affected piling up dirty cakes of half-dry oil paint on his dirty pallet – the kind of stupid, wasteful thing - only a painter with no sense of the cost or value of oil paint would do.                              

I had seen countless artists on deviantart as technically skilled and intellectually bankrupt - but I supposed they did not have Yeo’s easy entrée into high-society or gift for self-publicity. Like so many successful people, he was apparently easy to get along with, apolitical and happy to provide the rich with a glamorous lie about themselves. I wondered what it said about art and society in 2013 that the most successful portrait artist in Britain, was in the mould of the style over substance Giovanni Boldini from the tail end of the Belle Epoch a hundred years before.                                                                                    

As with late salon portrait painters like Giovanni Boldini and Antonio Mancini, I noticed that there was a dramatic discontinuity between Yeo’s faces and backgrounds – a schizophrenic schism between illustrative portrait conventions and attempts to be fashionably painterly in the areas around the face. This may seem like a minor issue but from the first time I saw Antonio Mancini’s portraits in The Hugh Lane Museum in the mid-80s - it was an issue I had thought about a lot. I found the difference between Mancini’s heavily impastoed - almost expressionistic backgrounds - and his more conventionally naturalistic face painting - odd and not fully convincing. Even though I liked Mancini’s work, I thought he had failed to reinvent the whole surface of the picture in the radical way that Cézanne had and thus it gave Mancini’s work a schizophrenic look - torn between the traditional past and the expressive future. As for Boldini, this schism between figure and ground, had led him to use bold gestural brushstrokes in the areas surrounding the figure - that suggested proto-futurism or even proto-Abstract-Expressionism but unlike de Kooning, Boldini did not go on to deconstruct the figure. Instead, Boldini rendered the faces of his society sitters, in a perfectly modelled naturalistic way that would have been acceptable to any academic hack.                                     

A hundred years later, Jonathan Yeo, painted faces in either an uninspired blended manner that was merely a pastiche of nineteenth century academic technique or painted them in a schematic and soulless pastiche of Lucien Freud’s method of building up form through a broken patchwork of brushstrokes. But Yeo painted these conventional faces on top of an artily scrubbed background that suggested nth generation Abstract Expressionism. So like his early twentieth century counterparts, Yeo’s work was a dishonest confection of styles whose instant success - was testament to its essentially kitsch character. The inherently theatrical nature of Yeo’s work was highlighted by his sitter’s love of dressing up and presenting themselves has ham actors - inventing their own media personas. Thus Yeo’s work was lie impacted upon lie to create a glamorous illusion that simply did not convince.                                                                                        

A couple of weeks later I saw Parkinson Meets Jonathan Yeo on Sky Arts, which I watched with the relish of a critic. I thought Yeo’s porno collage of George Bush gimmicky and typically neutered like most artistic attempts to appropriate porn. It also galled me to think, I had collaged porn into my paintings decades before Yeo - and had just got abuse - not the middle-class tittering that greeted Yeo’s wannabe bad boy posturing. As for Yeo’s paintings about plastic surgery (where Yeo had painted in the marks made by plastic surgeons before operating) they simply reminded me of poor imitations of Jenny Saville’s far superior work decades before. As I watched Parkinson’s banal, middle-brow, television show, without a shred of intellectual weight, I realized that another part of Yeo’s success was his shameless desire to be loved by such an audience and convince them that he really was up there with artists like Picasso and Sargent - and at the cutting edge of contemporary art.