|
Reed Valley, home of the spotted bush snake
2004, oil on linen, 61x61cm
Brian McAvera, playwright, art critic and curator,
has published 11 plays, four books on art, including a
monograph on Eamon Colman, and numerous catalogues,
essays and articles. He is an Associate Editor of
Sculpture (USA), and writes regularly for The Irish Arts
Review.
The whispering song of the bar-throated apalis
2004, oil on board, 36x36cm
The story of the bushmen told in rock and stone
2004, oil on
board, 36x36cm
|
|
|
IN THE EYE OF MEMORY |
|
Brian McAvera |
Upon Viewing
|
As one’s eyes range around this exhibition, heat and
light cream off the canvases, and an almost
Mediterranean exuberance of forms, glimpsed perhaps
through a heat haze, seen now from a distance, and now
right up close, visualised in remembrance long after the
act of looking - like an imaginary museum of memories -
come floating off the walls. Just as one’s memory of
particular places is often associated with a song that
one heard at the time - the young girl and the young
man, and they’re always young, caught in the sunlight,
with a pop song playing on a bar radio which leaks out
into the sunshine - the whole being an emotional
attitude to the thing observed, so too do Eamon Colman’s
paintings work upon us, for memories are not snapshots,
rather an emotional freightage, rinsed with memories of
place.
But there is always a yin and a yang. Look closer, and a
whole panoply of signs and symbols emerge from the often
succulent colour. Interior and exterior space, the cusp
of a breast shape, the erections of a phallic shape,
dark underpinnings of shadowy black, a rinse of magenta,
a world in which nature in the shape of tree or rock,
vegetation or the depths of blue-eyed water, all seem to
exist in some slippage between the real world and the
imagined world. Look long enough and we can persuade
ourselves that we are viewing mountain or canyon, open
or enclosed landscape or seascape - but this is a
mirage.
It is connected to the ocular vision that we all have in
common with the painter, but there the resemblance
ceases and potent, dreamlike, slightly disturbing, often
almost hallucinatory world of the painter begins. Strong
rich colour and bold shapes draw us in and then the
alchemy begins as the yin and the yang, the darkness and
the light, the troubling undercurrents and the sunny
surface sheen commingle.
Figuration is not an issue here. This looks like
that….but isn’t. Abstraction isn’t an issue either, as
elements from the real world are indisputably there.
There are paintings about retinal impact leaching you
into their world and asking you: do you really know
yourself? Just what is going on below the calm cheery
surface of your face? In a number of the works as in
Storms River there is a calligraphic skirling of wide
thin line, which plumes its way across the surface area,
as if dropped down like an opera gauze. It disturbs the
spatial dimensions, as one is capable of reading it, not
only in a linear, frontal manner, but also as ‘sewing’
its way into an almost perspectival sense of space.
However, in The Whispering Song of a Bar-Throated Apatis
(page 16), the calligraphy is thicker with the powerful
directional lines in yellow seeming to demarcate the
space like road markings, whereas the whirling, ovoid,
and partially ovoid shapes, seem to suggest a sense of
atmospheric disturbance. In almost all of the paintings
the space is shallow, collapsed in on itself like a
theatre set. This is an effect which is reinforced by
the picket-fence like striations in a number of the
works - defining enclosure and territoriality - one of a
whole number of a card-index thesaurus of signs such as
the loose, lime-green ‘smoke-rings’ which feature in
Reed Valley home to the Spotted Bush Snake (page 14),
the flotilla of green and brown circular patches, the
arrowed span of grey-black lozenge shapes, the thick
slightly curved circumflex shapes in pale blue, and so
forth.
Patterning creeps into this world, as if memories of
Klimt crossed with damask curtains, were silk-screened
onto the corners of images. This is not an artist who
wants to be pinned down. Is the patterning a decorative
arabesque to keep the eye alert? A structuring device to
contain a corner and rein it in? Or another entry in the
artist’s notebook of signs and carefully impenetrable
symbols? More likely, in this world of multi-tasking,
nothing is singular but everything is plural. |
After Interviewing the Artist |
Much as many’s a Modernist would love to assert the
opposite, no artwork, no matter what the medium, exists
in its own hermetic space. Social and political factors,
period detail, the detritus of a life, personal
circumstances, current art fashions are only some of the
possible contexts of a work of art, while another, often
crucial factor, is whether the artist has bored his or
her artesian well into a small corner of the world, or
opted for a continual geographical refreshment.
Interviewing the artist will always illuminate the work.
Technical detail will emerge, pertinent (or impertinent)
background information will surface and, so long as the
artist is a willing collaborator, patterns of intention,
interpretation and design will unfold. Often, the most
unlikely source material will emerge: what the artist
was reading, where he or she has been on holiday, what
works of other artists had been seen or studied, even
what music was playing in the studio or what radio play
was on in the background - all of this pot pourri of
scents, sights and sounds will often coagulate into the
sediment for a work of art. Good art is not
instantaneous notation but rather a slow process of
acquisition, absorption, exploration, interrogation of
painterly surface and painterly idea and, if you are
lucky, a honing down of excess baggage.
Eamon Colman went to South Africa in January 2004 for a
two month sojourn which took him and his partner (the
artist Pauline O'Connell) to Cape Town, then up to the
Cederberg mountains, and back down along the East cape
coastline - about 6,000 kilometres in a hired car.
Everywhere they went there was a marked contrast between
that of the ‘whites’ and that of ‘the coloreds.
For the best part of forty years Africa, in the shape of
his aunts, on his mother’s side, who used to send
regular letters home from what was then Rhodesia -
stamps as miniature paintings of an exotic world;
envelopes with the postmarks of a far-flung world - were
a part of the painter’s imagination, so much so that he
can remember the awe-inspiring effect, as a boy, of
pulling out an atlas and pronouncing the exotic names of
places like Mozambique. So his real journey to South
Africa had a Janus-like, pivotal effect, oscillating
between the need to go and see the New Africa, and the
need to tap into the Africa of his imagination.
However, other journeys, fictive or otherwise, take
place in the real world, journeys which may run parallel
to the main one, have no bearing whatsoever on the real
one, or else tributary like, flow into it. Thus it
happened that Colman had just recently finished reading
two Nabokov novels, Lolita, and Invitation to a
Beheading, both of which but especially the latter, in
their own ways, are about repressive regimes. In the
latter a condemned man in his cell starts to analyse the
landscape of his imagination, as well as the reality of
it. Where do the two collide?
In the book, for Colman, Nabokov makes clear that when
any changes in society take place, then dreaming, as of
a change of regime or life, is naïve. There is a sense
of longing, of wanting….
At the same time Colman was ‘trying to read Pearse in
the Irish’, noting that Pearse had ‘a beautiful sense of
the language which doesn’t come across in English. He
dreams of changing the Irish landscape’. The connecting
factor between Nabokov and Pearse, is the notion of an
interrelationship between the landscape of reality and
that of the imagination. For most of the artist’s
working life, he had been based in cities, making
sorties out into the country, and then bringing the
notebooks back into the studio. Just under a year ago he
had relocated to rural Kilkenny. Most of the works in
this exhibition were, quite deliberately, started in
Kilkenny, before he left for Africa, and during a recent
period of immersion in African guidebooks and the
African novels of Ben Okri (a useful parallel source to
the painter’s attitudes and methods). He was trying to
paint a series of African works without ever having been
there which, as he wryly noted ‘was a very European
thing to do!!’ In Africa he photographed constantly and
‘wrote a lot’. Once back home, he then finished all of
the paintings.
A case in point is The Story of the Bushmen Told in Rock
and Stone . Colman had found fascinating the sense of a
‘divorced’ history in Africa. He’d been taken to see
rock paintings but the guides were white men who had
been educated to tell the stories of this art, but it
was patently obvious that these were not their stories.
There was a gap, a dislocation, a sense of distance…So
far, so Nabokov.
When the painting was seemingly completed in the studio,
an interesting development took place. Every day the
artist would drive in and out of Kilkenny and he would
pass one particular tree. One night he woke up at 3
a.m., went into the studio, and instinctively made a
series of marks onto the painting. If you look at the
middle top of this painting you’ll see what he added:
the outline shape of the tree that he passed every day.
The landscape that he was living in was becoming a part
of his everyday vocabulary and the landscape of South
Africa was becoming a part of the landscape of his
imagination. As he puts it, ‘you don’t dream about
something that you don’t know. You dream about something
that you have an instinct for!’
Another layer in the palimpsest of confluences is South
African art, which he considered to be at a very
interesting stage as it was starting to look at
International sensibilities and to put itself forward as
a ‘world’ art. Much of the painting he found overly
figurative and quite colonial, except for the work in an
exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Cape town, where
African Americans, and European Africans, who had left
because of apartheid, had been commissioned to respond
to the AIDS culture - what he found fascinating were the
passionate responses. Equally the cave paintings from
five thousand years ago to two hundred and fifty years
ago, intrigued him. Figures, organic shapes and a sense
of mystery led up to, at the latter end of the
timescale, the San People’s first view of white man:
carrying guns - ‘a wonderful record of how native
Africans responded to the invaders’.
Another overlapping context is that of technique. In
this exhibition there are oils on canvas, oils on board,
and oils on thick handmade paper. Form follows, not just
function, but the possibilities of paint on different
surfaces. When he uses board, the artist coats it with
oil gesso, sands it, and then repeats this process about
ten times. Taking glass paper, he polishes the gesso
until it’s a shiny surface that is almost as translucent
as porcelain. The paint ‘slips’ on this surface,
allowing the kind of light feathery delicate marks that
are not really feasible with other surfaces: see for
example the right upper hand side of the left panel of
the diptych Sundays River meander it’s way past Yellow
Milkwood (page 10-11). The studies however are made on
the handmade paper, gessoed on one side only, and with
rabbit-skin glue on the other side ‘so that it will last
longer than me!’
A final context is that of the map reference on the
route of the painter’s continual journey from exhibition
to exhibition. In this case Colman considers that he
‘has really started to heighten the colour - full on!’
New colours are creeping into the palette like the green
and the greeny-pink, though not as he points out,
necessarily informed by what he saw in Africa, but
rather informed by him trying to put down his reality on
canvas, paper or board. The predominant colours are four
in number. There’s lemon yellow with a little pink added
to change the tone; Cadmium Orange with a little olive
green mixed in; a light green combined with a grass
green; and a Crimson Red, which has a glaze of Indian
red over it to give it a depth of colour.
Previously Colman thought that his colour appeared to be
too flat. There was not enough happening beneath the
surface. In an interesting demonstration of the link
between form and content, he noted that in South Africa
at the moment, there was a surface veneer of ‘things are
moving and changing’ but that when you scraped the
surface, ‘apartheid was alive and well’. That was when
he started looking at the under surface of the painting
as he wanted some form of ‘tension’ to happen.
If you look at the world of the artist’s paintings over
the years, you’ll note that the figure never appears.
Instead there are myriad forms of landscape. Africa
revealed to him the reason why the figure had never
appeared in his work. As he observed, in Ireland we tend
to forget that the land itself has a story to tell,
though not in any romantic sense, about the human
condition, in terms of its marks and its cuts.
So when you look at a Colman painting, you are given the
pleasures of form and colour but you are also given a
kind of story about the human condition of Ireland and
its links to the human condition elsewhere. Tropes from
fiction, painting and cave art commingle with the
forward momentum of his painterly development, both in
terms of content and technique. And the continent of
Africa, that land of exotic blossom and colonial excess,
that exotic country of the mind, slowly bleeds into the
rather less exotic, but perhaps more quixotic, land of
Ireland.
|
|
|
|
