John Breakey, That Cold Crisp Day at the Beach

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THAT COLD CRISP DAY AT THE BEACH

PA I N T I N G S BY J O H N B R E A K E Y

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PA I N T I N G S BY J O H N B R E A K E Y

The Naughton Gallery at Queen’sLanyon BuildingQueen’s University BelfastBT7 1NN

Telephone: +44 (0)28 9097 3580Fax: +44 (0)28 9097 3401Email: [email protected]

This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition

That Crisp Cold Day at the Beach Paintings by John Breakey

at The Naughton Gallery, Queen’s University, Belfast19 October - 28 November 2010

ISBN 978 0 853899 78 5

Photography: Bryan RutledgeDesign: Kunnert + Tierney

© 2010 John Breakey, S. B. Kennedy and The Naughton Gallery at Queen’s University Belfast.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the permission of the artist, author, photographer and publisher.

T H AT CO L D C R I S P DAY AT T H E B E AC H

To those familiar with the art scene in Belfast in the 1950s and early 1960s, John

Breakey’s is a name to conjure with. At the age of eighteen, in 1950, he was elected

a member of the Ulster Academy of Arts; two years later, in 1952, he showed a

Self-Portrait at the Royal Ulster Academy’s annual exhibition in the Belfast Museum

and Art Gallery; in 1955, he had three landscapes at the Ulster Arts Club’s Spring

exhibition at the CEMA Gallery in Belfast; in 1957 his Standing Stone — ‘he makes

a striking comment on the fascinating associations which the erosion of rocks

can create’, a premonition of work to come — caught the eye of the News-Letter’s

art critic, Frederick Allen (18 November 1957), in his review of a show at Belfast’s

Piccolo Gallery; and in 1963 he was included in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art

in Dublin along with such luminaries as Louis le Brocquy, Sam Francis, Willem de

Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg.

Born in Belfast in 1932, Breakey first studied art under the well known Irish painter

Charles Lamb (1893-1964) at Carraroe in County Galway. As a young man in the

1920s Lamb, who came from Portadown, had been a member of the Society of

Dublin Painters, which Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats and a few others had founded to

forward the ideals of the modern movement in art in Ireland. Thus, unknowingly at

the time, Breakey had tapped into a long and influential tradition in Irish painting.

In time, like many of his contemporaries — the later Paul Henry, William Conor,

Maurice MacGonigal, for instance — Lamb’s work grew more academic becoming

typical of what Bruce Arnold has called the ‘school of Irish academic realism.’1 But

for all that, Lamb imbued in Breakey a (then unfashionable) respect for the practical

considerations of picture-making, such as the preparation of canvases, the layout

of paints on his palette and so on. Moreover, Lamb had been one of the earliest

painters to settle in the west of Ireland where he was captivated by the tranquillity

of the area and, in a way this, expressed through a flattening of the picture-plane

and an emphasis on the juxtaposition of shape and colour, became the real subject

matter of his work, elements which, as we shall see, were to have much bearing on

Breakey’s painting.

In 1953 Breakey entered the Belfast College of Art to study painting and lithography.

There his teachers included the influential painting and drawing masters,

Newton Penpraze (1888-1978) – ‘a popular and inspiring teacher’, as John Hewitt

Written by S. B. Kennedy

8 F IG. 1 : UNEASY CALM, 1989

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commented,2 who placed much emphasis on good draughtsmanship — and Romeo

Charles Toogood (1902-66). Toogood had an enormous influence on all his pupils,

for it was as a teacher that he found his true vocation being, in Kenneth Jameson’s

words, ‘that rara avis, the intuitive teacher.’3 The painter Tom Carr (1909-99) was

another of Breakey’s teachers and, after a distinguished career at the Belfast

College, in 1958 Carr helped him to gain admission to the Slade School of Fine Art at

London University (Carr’s own alma mater), one of the most celebrated art schools

in the country. At the Slade, where he remained until 1960, Breakey continued to

study painting and lithography, his teachers now including Stanley Jones (b. 1933),

who later managed the Curwen Studio which specialisied in fine art prints, and the

Welshman Ceri Richards (1903-71), a painter and lithographer who had been much

influenced by the celebrated German painter and printmaker, Max Ernst (1891-1976).

Lucian Freud and Keith Vaughan were also lecturing at the Slade in his time there.

For Breakey the experience of the Slade and living in London was ‘just wonderful’.

In his own words, ‘Each day I would either draw or paint in the life room, work on

the landing, painting my own ideas alongside other artists such as Anthony Green

or work in the lithographic room where Stanley Jones would help greatly with the

technical side of lithography.’ Ceri Richards helped with the aesthetic side of his art.

‘I got on very well with him,’ he recalled. Often on Sundays he and a fellow-student,

John Salt — who later went to New York and became one of the Photo Realists —

would go round the London galleries before going to the Royal College Common

Room, where Salt knew some of the students. ‘It wasn’t until much later,’ he

recorded, ‘that I realised that some of the students we had met had started the Pop

Art movement, so I was privileged to see some of their very first pop art paintings.’4

Among these young artists was David Hockney. As a student in London Breakey

exhibited relatively little, but in 1959 he showed a lithograph, Two Forms, with the

avant-garde ‘Young Contemporaries’, a group comprised of students from the Slade,

the Royal College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. The following year the

Junior Common Room at Keble College, Oxford, purchased a lithograph, Seascape

Head; he was beginning to establish himself in a wider sea.

On leaving the Slade Breakey returned briefly to Northern Ireland, teaching art

part-time at Carrickfergus Technical School and Hopefield School in Belfast. At this

time, too, he got married, but soon he and his wife were back in London where he

both taught and pursued his own work. His painting and printmaking — lithography

has always been as important to Breakey as painting — in these years were almost

entirely abstract and ‘Hard Edge’, which was the fashion at the time, but he later

destroyed much of it. However he also made a number of constructions in perspex

and other materials, which were inspired by the landscape, of which Pentarhythms,

1970 (Ulster Museum), is a good example. Throughout the 1960s Breakey exhibited

back home in Belfast and in June 1962 he held his first one-man show, Paintings,

Drawings and Lithographs, at Gallery 25 in Brunswich Street, Belfast. ‘There is

nothing pretty here and the strength of the artist’s impulse may be momentarily

taken for crudity, but a little reflection will reveal his thoroughness, his patient

exploration to bring about these pictures, now finished and approved’, wrote A.W.

Bowyer in his review for The Belfast Telegraph (5 June 1962). The force of his work

was clearly apparent. In the following year, 1963, he exhibited with Malcolm Bennett,

R.J. Croft, David Crone, Noel Millar, Cecil McCartney, John Pakenham and John B.

10 F IG. 2 : F IELD OF CROSSES FOR ULSTER, 1990

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Vallely in 8 Painters at the Magee Gallery in Belfast – ‘John Breakey’s work, apart

from Landscape Markings and Mourne Road, suggests experiment rather than

fulfilment’, A.W. Bowyer commented in the Belfast Telegraph (undated press cutting,

artist’s papers) — an exhibition which was to be the first of a number of shows held

in successive years under the name ‘Group 63’. And in the Arts Council’s Ulster

Painting ’68 exhibition he had two pieces, Pink Perspex and Interlocking Blue Forms,

which reflect his brief interest in making constructions.

In 1973, after a decade in London, the Breakeys returned to Northern Ireland and

settled in Newcastle, County Down. John joined the staff of Rathfriland High School,

where he taught until his retirement from teaching in 1985. Around the same time

he established a print workshop, with the emphasis on lithography, and studio at

his home.5 Also, in September of that year he held his second one-man show, at

the Octagon Gallery, Belfast, showing constructions, lithographs, etchings and

drawings. The 1980s and 1990s continued this pattern of both mixed and one-

man exhibitions, of which the most notable were his joint show with R. J. Croft in

Belfast’s Fenderesky Gallery in August 1985 — ‘The work in this exhibition is based

on the Mourne Landscape. I have no desire to illustrate this landscape but rather to

try to create images which have their own concentrated form of reality’, he wrote in

the catalogue — and solo shows at the Ulster Arts Club in 1990, the Gordon Gallery,

Londonderry, 1993, the Pantheon Gallery, Dublin, also 1993, and the Cavehill Gallery,

Belfast, in 1994.

As has been said, John Breakey’s early paintings and lithographs were abstract,

but he has never felt comfortable working in that manner. He refuses to categorise

his aesthetic, saying that he ‘paints his feelings’ rather than appearances, although

since he gave up abstraction landscape is ever his subject matter. Since he settled

at Newcastle the landscape of the Mourne Mountains and the sea have dominated

his output – ‘the landscape in the Mournes is different every time I look at it,’ he

told Brian McAvera6 – his execution becoming boldly expressionist, his brushwork

malerisch and his colours often strident in their intensity and power. Yet there

remains in his work an intense celebration of ‘place’ – something that he ascribes to

Charles Lamb – and an absence of sentiment of any kind.

In 1990 Breakey was elected a full academician of the Royal Ulster Academy, which

was an accolade on his career. Also that year he was one of eight lithographers

chosen worldwide to attend the famous Tamarind Institute at Albuquerque, New

Mexico, a course of study that lasted four months.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Breakey made a number of paintings which,

landscape-based, were influenced by the Ulster ‘troubles’ of those years. One can

see the beginnings of this development in Uneasy Calm, 1989 (fig. 1), and Gorse

Tormented by the Wind, c.1990. The former is based on the sea front at Newcastle,

but conveys a sense of unease and tension which becomes more overt in A Field

of Crosses for Ulster, 1990 (fig. 2). In the latter work the landscape of the Mourne

Mountains provides the setting while boulders strewn across the scene become

crosses and hence symbols for a society tearing itself apart. Besides the strong

red at the top of the composition – a bloodied land (?) – the colours are muted,

12 F IG. 3 : THE GORSE H ILL , 1992

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even dark and menacing. Interviewing the artist for the Ulster Architect in 1990

Anne Davey Orr commented that A Field of Crosses marked ‘the first appearance

of anything political’ in Breakey’s work.7 This trend continued in Gorse Totem, 1992,

and may be read in one or two contemporary pictures, although it was short lived –

Ian Hill noted the ‘lighter and brighter’ pictures in his Gordon Gallery show in 19938

– and already in The Gorse Hill, also 1992 (fig. 3), and A Walk in Autumn, 1993, we

see him in a lighter mood and heading towards the more representational manner

of Luke’s Mountain, 1994, and The Knitters’ House, 1995, the latter being a glorious

panorama of the Mournes.

If Breakey’s treatment of the landscape is intensely personal, his manner of working

is also distinctive. He frequently makes drawings, but these serve as little more than

aides memoires, as it’s really his feelings for a place that interest him. To begin with

he usually resolves his feelings, the mood and the compositional elements in small

pictures, which are then translated onto much larger canvases, although the small

pieces he considers as works in their own right, rather than mere studies for the

final pictures. Many of the pieces in the present exhibition illustrate this process.

For example, A Ploughed field was once There is the forerunner of Spring was only

Yesterday, the former being clearly at a more experimental stage of development

than the succinct treatment of the latter. By working in this manner and exhibiting

both pieces, as in this show, we as spectators share a privileged glimpse of the

artist’s creative impulse.

The pictures in this exhibition are light in mood and evoke a joie de vivre. That

Sunny Day with the Yellow Gorse, 2007, is a good example, the colours and the

bravura brushwork being perfectly matched. The rise of the mountain we have seen

many times in, for example, the Field of Crosses and The Gorse Hill pictures and it is

the same hill that occupies the background in the Luke’s Mountain composition. But

besides the mountains, the sea at Newcastle has provided Breakey with a constantly

renewable source of subject matter, as can be seen to effect in his diverse treatment

of The Sea Within the Wave, 2006, Active Sky Tranquil Sea, 2009, and The Calm

Before the Storm, 2009, a pastel. The almost sensuous nature of the latter, which

owes much to the medium, also conveys the deftness of Breakey’s draughtsmanship,

an inheritance from Newton Penpraze and Romeo Toogood. In The Taste of the Sea,

2005, a watercolour, the title suggests an almost literal interpretation of the subject

and hence gently dramatizes the artist’s statement that it is his feelings for the

scene that are paramount. Precipitation, 2006, I Don’t remember everything about

that Day, 2010, and That Cold Crisp Day at the Beach, 2010 – which gives its name

to this exhibition – have much in common in the expressive character of the eager

brushwork and their emphasis on the existential business of painting.

John Breakey’s absence from Ireland for a decade in the 1960s and early 1970s has

meant that his work is less well known here than it deserves to be. He is, in Brian

McAvera’s words, one of the unsung petit maitres of Irish art,9 although as we have

seen he is not really such a ‘petit’ master, having developed an independent manner

of execution in a variety of media and a distinctive approach to his subject matter.

Being essentially a landscapist, too, places him in a long tradition of Irish painting to

which he had made an original contribution.

14 FOOTNOTES

1 Bruce Arnold, A Concise History of Irish Art, London, Thames and Hudson, revised ed., 1977, pp. 139-40.

2 John Hewitt, Art in Ulster: 1, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1977, p. 98.3 Kenneth Jamison, ‘Painting and Sculpture’, in M. Longley (ed.), Causeway:

The Arts in Ulster, Belfast and Dublin, 1971, p.59. For a detailed note on R. C. Toogood and his career see S. B. Kennedy, R. C. Toogood 1902-1966, exhibition catalogue, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast, April 1978.

4 John Breakey, notes to an invitation card to the opening of his one-man exhibition of Lithographs, Oil paintings, Pastels and Watercolours, Bell Gallery, Belfast, 29 April 2002.

5 The print workshop was finally dismantled in August 2010.6 Brian McAvera, ‘The Lithographer’s Mark’, Irish Arts Review,

Spring 2008, p. 9.7 Anne Davey Orr, ‘Stones Become Crosses; Crosses Become Stones,’

Ulster Architect, October 1990, p. 42.8 Unidentified press cutting, 8 April 1993, artist’s papers.9 McAvera, 2008, p. 3

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CATALOGUE OF WORKS

16 THE BEACH IS THE BEACH

2003 | oil on canvas | 137cm x 152cm

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18 THE SEA WITHIN THE WAVE


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20 SPRING TIDE


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22 PRECIPITATION


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24 SPRING WAS ONLY YESTERDAY


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26 THE SUNNY DAY WITH THE YELLOW GORSE


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28 THAT COLD CRISP DAY AT THE BEACH


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30 AN AUTUMN WALK


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32 THE HIGH ROAD


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34 SPRING TIDE


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36 A PLOUGHED FIELD WAS ONCE THERE


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38 DESCENDING MIST


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40 D ISAPPEARING MOUNTAIN


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42 CRISP SPRING DAY


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44 THAT QUIET DAY


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46 ACTIVE SKY TRANQUIL SEA


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48 I DON’T REMEMBER EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT DAY


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50 THE TASTE OF THE SEA

2005 | watercolour on paper | 78cm x 97cm

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52 THE WET FIELD

2004 | watercolour on paper | 80cm x 97cm

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54 THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

2009 | pastel on paper | 80cm x 97cm

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56 THE HIDDEN COLOURS OF A MISTY DAY

2009 | pastel on paper | 82cm x 97cm

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B IOGRAPHY

1932 Born in Belfast.

1950 Elected a member of the Ulster Academy of Arts.

1953-58 Belfast College of Art.

1958-60 Slade School of Fine Art, London University.

1973 Settled at Newcastle, Co. Down. Taught at Rathfriland

High School until 1985, before retiring from teaching to

concentrate on running his print workshop.

1990 Elected an academician of the Royal Ulster Academy.

1990 One of eight lithographers chosen worldwide to

attend the Tamarind Institute at Albuquerque,

New Mexico, USA.

1991 Elected a member of the Ulster Arts Club.

1994 His Self Portrait presented to the University of Limerick.

The work is a dyptich, one part being a portrait, the

other an abstract based on Slieve Donard.

PREVIOUS ONE-MAN EXHIBITIONS

1962 Paintings, Drawings and Lithographs by John Breakey,

Gallery 25, Belfast, 4-23 June.

1973 John Breakey, Octagon Gallery, Belfast,

14-29 September.

1984 John Breakey: Drawings, Paintings and Lithographs,

Grant Fine Art, Newcastle, 26 October - 14 November.

1990 John Breakey: Paintings, Ulster Arts Club Gallery,

Belfast, from 8 November.

1992 John Breakey, Monaghan Museum, Monaghan.

1993 John Breakey, Gordon Gallery, Londonderry, April.

1993 John Breakey: Paintings and Lithography,

Pantheon Gallery, Dublin, 1 - 25 September.

1994 John Breakey, Cavehill Gallery, Belfast, 3 - 19 November.

1996 John Breakey, Down County Museum, Downpatrick.

1999 John Breakey, Clotworthy Arts Centre, Antrim.

2002 Lithographs, Oil Paintings, Pastels and Watercolours by

John Breakey, Bell Gallery, Belfast, 11 - 29 April.

2003 John Breakey, St. Patrick’s Centre, Downpatrick.

2003 John Breakey, William Carlton Summer School.

2007 ‘My View from the Mournes’ by John Breakey, Down

Arts Centre, Downpatrick, until 22 December.

2007 John Breakey, Lagan Island Arts Centre, Lisburn.

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PUBLIC AND CORPORATE COLLECTIONS

Allied Irish Bank

Arts Council of Northern Ireland

British Telecom, Belfast

Department of Finance and Personnel, Northern Ireland

Down County Museum, Downpatrick

First Trust Bank

Hastings Group of Hotels

Heathrow Airport, London

Monaghan Museum, Monaghan

Northern Bank

Queen’s University, Belfast

Royal Ulster Academy

SDLP, Belfast

Ulster Bank

University of Cambridge

University of Dublin

University of Limerick

University of London

University of Oxford

Ulster Museum, Belfast

Also represented in numerous private collections in Ireland,

England, Canada, Germany, Turkey, USA.

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S B Kennedy was formerly Head of Fine and Applied Art at the Ulster Museum,

Belfast and is now a freelance curator and consultant. His research interests have

centred on developments in twentieth-century Irish Art. His books include Irish

Art and Modernism 1880-1950, for which he received the prestigious Sunday

Independent/Irish Life Visual Arts Award in 1991, Great Irish Artists: from Lavery

to Le Brocquy, Gill and MacMillan, 1997, and monographs on the painters Frank

McKelvey, T P Flanagan and David Crone. His biography of Paul Henry (1876-1958)

was published in 2000 by Yale University Press and was reissued in 2007 along with

a catalogue raisonné of Henry’s oeuvre.

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Documents

John Breakey, That Cold Crisp Day at the Beach