Irish Arts Review

Patrick IrelandAuthor(s): Dorothy WalkerSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), p. 57Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491732 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

EXHIBITIONS

Neil Shawcross Neil Shawcross, a lecturer at the University of Ulster, is one of Northern Ireland's most popular painters. Born in England and educated at Bolton and Lancaster Colleges of Art he came to Belfast in 1962.

Shawcross is probably best known for his full length oil portraits of public figures such as Alderman David Cooke, Lord Mayor of Belfast; the jazz enthus iast Solly Lipsitz and, more recently,

Michael Barnes, Director of the Queen's Festival. These portraits are notable for the relaxed pose of the sitters and the spontaneity of the artist's handling of his medium. More recently Shawcross has concentrated on water colour paintings and these reflect a number of interests and influences - whilst acknowledging a debt to painters like Bonnard, Matisse and Rothko he has become deeply involved. with the work of primary school children, encouraging their unaffected approach to colour and form. This has obviously influenced his own work with the result that his style is a curious but comfort

able amalgam of sophistication and innocence.

Shawcross is an excellent colourist and in a recent exhibition of water

colours at the Grant Fine Art Gallery in

Newcastle he illustrated his consider able skill in exploiting the qualities of translucency and luminosity attached to

water-colour painting. In his Chair Series, where he uses the image of a

simple ladder-backed chair as an almost abstract motif, his main interest is in the subtle relationship between the red, yellow, blue and white chairs and the richly purpled backgrounds. In some, like Red Chair, the image stands out intensely from the softly rounded rect angle - in others it is almost completely engulfed by the vibrant blush of a background that is subtly gradated into two, sometimes three, horizontal bands so that the colour appears to have leached downwards, recalling the work of Rothko. Texturally, the works are complex - in Two Chairs the back

ground is a build-up of mauves, blues

and purples that has a pastel-like quality that contrasts beautifully with the luminosity of the pale blue chairs.

He likes to use the inherent liquidity of water-colour to soften contours, del iberately blurring images with the result

that many of his works have a romantic, dream-like quality. Flowers in a Stone Jar and Nude both have an air of soft nostalgia which is transformed into inti macy in the large Nude in Bathroom, visually the focus of this exhibition. Unlike the majority of his composi tions which exploit a centally placed, upright image (whether it be a chair or a coke bottle) this black-stockinged nude unconscious of being observed, is slightly off-centre and is leaning to the left. This lends the painting an air of spontaneity, of imminent movement - an element absent in his other works.

The intimacies of women at their toilette is a theme followed by Shaw cross in a portfolio of drawings that complimented this exhibition. With an economy of line that recalls Matisse he describes their activities with deceptive simplicity and the inclusion of these drawings acted as an excellent foil to

the sensuous colour of this most sophis ticated exhibition at the Grant Fine Art

Gallery, Newcastle, Co. Down. Amanda Croft

Patrick Ireland Appropriate to the Lenten season, Patrick Ireland's rope drawing'Purgatory' filled the difficult space of the Douglas

Hyde Gallery. Although made of thin white picture cord, the work effortlessly dominated the gallery. The walls were painted a shadowy grey which registered, not as a colour, but simply as if the walls were in shadow. On the main back wall of the space, a dynamic arrow-head shape in a pale sky-blue resolved itself into the initials HCE, Here Comes Everybody, H.C. Earwicker, Howth Castle and Environs. The logo-shape had the appearance of floating or of being projected on the wall, and the letters referred to James Joyce's famous last novel Finnegans Wake.

This complex and aesthetically quite beautiful drawing in space was a visual presentation of Finnegans Wake as an image of Purgatory, an idea proposed to Patrick Ireland by the former Director of the National Gallery, the Surrealist poet and close friend of Joyce and Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy.

Patrick Ireland translated the concept into a labyrinthine state in which a

white Ariadne's thread led from the

pages of Finnegans Wake on a table in

the gallery, through a complex abstract composition of intersecting lines and spaces, to the visionary emblem of Every

man floating in indeterminate 'mystical' space. The white cord environment was

made from one continuous length of string. When sitting at the table, the spectator was vouchsafed a glimpse of beatific order as the pattern of lines fell into place with the letters HCE.

A low sound accompaniment to the installation murmured, on one side, a recitative of the opening/closing passage of Finnegans Wake: 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay...'/'A way a lone a last a loved a long the ' and, on the other, a pleading litany of phrases from the novel.

One could discuss at great length the parallel complexities of sound, space, and line in 'Purgatory', and of sound, literary image and structure in Finnegans

Wake; and, again, some of the treat ments devised by other artists delving in Joyce's infinite source-mine, such as John Cage in music and, at a more decorative level, Timothy Hennessy's collage installation with Patrick Healy's

marathon solo reading. 'Purgatory' was Patrick Ireland's 74th

rope installation, most of which were made since the early seventies in museums and art galleries in the United States of America. These 'drawings' in space are individually composed to articulate the architectural space which they inhabit They mobilise inherent qualities of the space while simulta neously inventing their own spatial real ity by the conjunction of lines with

painted areas on the walls. While seemingly very simple in their visual

means, they invariably engender complex perceptions or perspective, spatial rela tionships, aesthetic stimulation and incursions into other art forms such as literature, music, cinema ('Kane'), and architecture ('Borromini's Underpass').

The rope drawings followed the artist's notable serial work in the sixties

where he used the Ogham alphabet for drawings and sculpture based on the

words 'One', 'Here', 'N.ow', a unity in

time and space, in which there is now

much renewed interest.

Dorothy Walker

-57

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