A journey to the past

Bernard Canavan’s paintings provide rare glimpses of a displaced generation of Irish whose experience of emigration in England often left them too disillusioned to record their experiences

IRISH MEN poured thick soups of tarmac on the ground. They pounded spikes as rails were laid. There was a muscular crunching of earth and bone as they dug trenches that took them towards their own eventual graves.

This is the world witnessed in Bernard Canavan’s paintings. For decades, the Irish abroad worked as mules on construction sites, pressing the rural spade to urban use. We know their labour and strength helped build the skyscrapers and highways of America, the bridges and roads of Australia, the tracks and tunnels of the London underground and the tower blocks that sprang from England’s razed inner-city tenements and war-bombed slums. We have vague notions of uncles and grandfathers as 1950s Kilburn Irish, all Teddy-boy quiffs and sideburns. But art has produced very few images of Ireland’s lost emigrants.

Canavan has a personal affinity with the Irish who went to England, and his paintings are a long-overdue visual monument to an invisible people. He has captured the migrant in simple, often idealised paintings of men digging roads, sitting on sagging suitcases on the boat train from Holyhead to Euston and clustered around the pubs of northwest London with signature pints of national brew. Why paint these people? “Because, as people who experienced the extremes of life, they were heroes,” Canavan says. “My father was 52 when he first came to England. He had never been out of the country before, nor had he done much physical work. He lived for the next 20 years in lodging houses. He worked in dead-end jobs until he died outside the world that had created him, where he had been known and recognised as someone. My father was only one of hundreds of thousands of such men. They were heroes. But he was not unusual – his counterparts can be found in any London night shelter today.”

Canavan was born in 1944 and grew up in Edgeworthstown in Co Longford. His insight into the emigrant condition is not a remote or studious one: he went to Britain in the 1960s and has remained there, working first as an illustrator and later as a teacher of both Irish and art history. His most recent exhibition was Changing Timesrecently at Pearse Street library.

His paintings take the world of Irish emigrant archetypes and capture them in pivotal moments. Embarkationshows a lonely line of migrants scuttling up the gangplank of the boat to England; Disembarkationdepicts them on the other side. In both, their possessions are borne like small, dissolving crosses.

“That generation underwent an intense loss of status on that boat. At the very least, they were going to Ireland’s old enemy, to godless England. People didn’t want to admit that they emigrated,” says Canavan. “If you asked them, they would deny it. They would say that they were only over ‘for a couple of years’ and then they were going back to buy a pub or farm. Many deferred their lives for years in this state of denial.”

WHILE IRELAND TOYS with an understanding of its emigrant past (and sadly must deal with signs of its return once again), this tends to be framed by references to Famine coffin ships and statistics. Individual family histories house memories of aunts and uncles who left. We have a collective notion of forced emigration that includes both financial entrepreneurs and deadbeat drunkards on the pavement outside the Swan in Stockwell. We appreciate the economics of the migrant remittance, those payday fivers and tenners stuffed into envelopes and sent to siblings and parents back home as cultural seed capital for the boom times of the 1990s. But the 1950s and 1960s emigrant has often been confined by such light sociology and, more often again, just conveniently forgotten.

Complex decades of human lives are trapped in adjectives such as “uneducated” and “alcoholic” (1950s/1960s), “eager” and “European” (1980s). But where is the visual expression of all this? Might the migrants not have depicted themselves in a secret store of “naive” artworks? Canavan refutes this possibility, believing that migrant struggle and ambition had not the luxury of self-reference.

“Most emigrants would not have aspired to being artists,” he says. “If they wanted anything, they wanted proof of success that they could show back home. It is the second generation that has become artists.”

It is a double-layered tragedy if our national loss of migrants is compounded by a void of visual evidence of their new lives. Surely these emigrants took snapshots as they set off on their adventure?

“I suspect the emigrant group who took photographs were women who married and had families,” says Canavan. “The more successful and stable they became, the more they charted their success visually – the new house, the holidays in Ireland. But the men who went down in the holes in the ground were never recorded on celluloid.”

Canavan’s painted men lurk by freshly dug ditches, they wield the spade as the blunt instrument of their introspection. Canavan paints a red-robed barmaid and she becomes the softness in the brutal lives of navvies lowering their poor London stout. Such nakedly empathetic studies hang alongside larger-format conceptual pieces.

One of these has a dozen or so Irish people falling down from the sky on to a waiting London below – but that retreating sky is painted as an inverted rural landscape of faraway hills. Emigrant Journey/National Journeyis a triptych across which a line of pilgrim migrants progress from a rural town, traverse an interzone and finally arrive in their new city.

BUT WHILE HIS work constitutes a striking visual monument to the Irish migrant struggle in England, Canavan does not overlook its dark side: “There were wasted lives, male brutality, loneliness, homesickness. There was the dog-eat-dog behaviour of Irish employers in a hurry to prove to themselves that they were successes. There was the pretentiousness of the successful – but what else would you expect from a people atomised and alienated from a value system they brought with them from Ireland but which could not function in the new urban environment?

“These were the shortcomings of a confused and status-depressed people desperately trying to find themselves again and rebuild their lives. Yes, there was a dark side, but of sins that might be forgiven.”

See bernardcanavan.com. Canavan was featured in the recent two-part series, The Forgotten Irish, on TV3. Half Lives, a 30-minute film about the artist is up for an award on Sunday in the Clones Film Festival which opened last night and runs until Sunday. See clonesfilmfestival.com/festival/short-films