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Soul Buoy
1997, oil on canvas, 90x90cm
Theo Dorgan is a poet, broadcaster, editor, translator and
scriptwriter. Recent books include a prose account of a
transatlantic journey, Sailing for Home (penguin Ireland, 2004),
and Songs of Earth and Light, translations of Slovenian poet
Barbara Korun (Southword Editions, 2005)
Mary's House
1989, mixed media on paper, 45x60cm
They put a road through the house of the Snake King
1994, oil on paper, 105x127cm
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PAINTING SILENCE IN THE WORLD |
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Theo Dorgan |
What do we think about when we look at paintings? Unless
we have been instructed in the language of art history
or schooled in a language of formal criticism, I suspect
that most of us, faced with a painting, become quickly
swamped in an attempt to command the experience by
describing it to ourselves. We swim in a culture that,
broadly speaking, is dominated by narrative, and this
makes it very difficult for us to approach a sensory
experience directly: we are always, in that revealing
phrase, trying to collect our thoughts, constantly
trying to order experience in language so that we may
repeat it to ourselves and to others. We are rarely
capable of switching off that incessant voice in the
head, the self chattering to itself.
The painter shares a common humanity with us, and is
therefore always at risk of being caught in the same
trap: faced with the world or standing before the blank
canvas he or she is also trapped in this endless
internal dialogue, this endless sub-audible flow of
words.
It is revealing, bearing this in mind, that Eamon
Colman speaks so often of the role that solitude plays
in the making of his paintings. Solitude is often
productive of stillness, and stilling the internal
dialogue in order simply to be is the foundation as it
is the aim of meditation; the ideal experience of
painting, of making the work or viewing it, is framed in
a meditative stillness. You might even say that one of
the marks of a good painting, a painting that works on
the terms it proposes to itself, and hence to us, is
that it evokes that certain stillness. By stillness I
mean not the absence of either stimulus or consciousness
but actually the reverse of this, a state of heightened
attention where mind, eye, breath and awareness of being
in the world includes the painting, is animated by and
in direct communication with the painting.
A Klee or a Klimt or a Colman can bring me to this
place where colour is present as colour, form as form,
and the experience of colour and form in play with each
other is a sufficient experience in itself. I don’t mean
to say that an awareness of art-historical or critical
consciousness is not valuable or important; I am simply
trying to say that it is sometimes possible, with good
painting, to be in the presence of the work without
having the experience interpreted or framed by
narrative, our own or another’s. There is the sentient
self and the thing present to that sentient self and
both are in the world and both, for an indeterminate
time, are outside history.
Colman is a walker, he walks the world down until the
internal voice is quieted and he can see colour, feel
space. He walks out into the world until his body
remembers its proper home in the world, remembers that
it is not separate from the world, and then in the
stillness of the studio the memory of sensory
experiences gives rise to paintings that in their turn
evoke in the viewer the same kind of delight in the fact
of being alive in this world. When I stand before one of
his paintings I am conscious of being at home in my
body, at one with my eye, dwelling on and in the colours
and forms that have the whole of my attention. His
paintings have what is sometimes called a dreamlike
quality, but that’s a lazy term; better to say he sees
the world as it falls on his eye, as if unmediated, and
paints the world as he would like it to fall on your eye
or mine. It is a replete and sensual experience, as full
of itself and as sufficient to itself as any experience
the delighted seeing body can have.
Colman is, of course, literate and politically savvy,
as his African paintings show; he is an acute and
original presence in our contemporary debates; he is a
generous help and friend to many in the busy world of
commissions and workshops and organisation; but what I’m
concerned with here is simply his paintings, the
products of his imagination which become luminous
presences in ours. Coleridge speaks, in the Biographia
Literaria, of the distinction between the Primary and
Secondary imaginations. The latter, he says, plays with
fixities and definites, images, words, forms and
stratagems that have been used before and are now
composed and recombined in pleasing patterns. The
Primary imagination, he says, brings new things into
existence, things neither spirit nor matter but
indubitably in the world, present to the imagination but
only to the imagination. (Coleridge does, of course, go
on to say that this proposition will, to many, be like a
theory of music to the deaf, of colour to the blind).
Eamon Colman makes paintings that are present to the
imagination, in the world but not necessarily of it.
When I stand in front of one of his works I am not
conscious of time passing. I am entirely at ease in what
Wittgenstein, lover of Dublin’s Botanic Gardens, calls
the only world that is the case, a world that
accommodates these paintings with ease. Tapiés does this
for me, too, Klee does it, Seán McSweeny does it.
We make a distinction between thought and feeling, as
if thought cannot be sensuous or feeling a kind of
intelligence. Colman, a thoughtful man, makes paintings
that rely for their primary effect on the sensuous
intelligence that is present in both the making and the
perceiving. Literally, he paints colour and form. The
colours and forms are prompted by his attentive presence
in the world, but they are not paintings of the world.
Better to say they are paintings in the world, new
things, unknown before now, sites of pleasure and
learning, sufficient to themselves.
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