The Greenlane Gallery in Dingle is introducing a new audience to the beauty of Co Kerry with its new branch in Paris, writes Gemma Tipton.
So much of Ireland is defined in our minds through art, and not always for the best. There is Joyce's Dublin, a place of drinking, poetic philosophy, the dubious lure of Monto, and walks on Sandymount Strand. I can't think of Achill without remembering both Camille Souter and Paul Henry's painted landscapes, although the name of a chapter from Heinrich Böll's Irish Journal also comes to mind. He called it "Mayo - God Help Us", because every time he told anyone that he and his family were headed to the northwest county they would reply: "God help you." Limerick is just recovering (one would hope) from Angela's Ashes; Co Monaghan is immortalised, unforgettably and rather gloomily, by Patrick Kavanagh, with his "stony grey soil"; and, perhaps most unfairly of all, the beautiful, wild and astonishing scenery of Co Kerry, at the western edge of Europe, seems forever blighted by the baleful effect of Peig Sayers.
Peig, like Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, is one of those books that are probably a bit better than I remember them. Suffering from being taught in school, it, in its turn, inflicted suffering on those required to learn it. Reading, more recently, Tomás Ó Criomhthain's An tOileánach, or The Island Man, although this time in English, I found a certain poetry to the stories of what was endured by the population of Co Kerry in general and the Blasket Islanders in particular. There is something very compelling about the combination of the incredible beauty of the scenery and the difficulty of eking out a living against such a backdrop. And, despite the strength of the work of visual artists such as Henry and Souter, it is mainly through our literature and our music that people, particularly visitors to this country, feel they have a sense of Ireland at all.
One of the reasons is financial. In the past you needed materials and money to make art, and, more particularly, if you wanted to make it your career you needed a patron to give you commissions, to buy your work, to keep you and your family going. Meanwhile, the oral tradition flourished, songs and stories keeping language and culture alive, even while enforcement of the penal laws was at its height.
Because of this, we don't have the same strength within our visual-art tradition, as an expression of our land and its history, as you might find in France or Italy. Nonetheless, landscape painting is alive and well in this country, and in some places clusters of artists are defining a sense of place in entirely different ways. There are the Tory Island painters, and there is also a group of artists working on very different expressions of the rugged landscape in the area around Dingle, in west Co Kerry.
I love west Co Kerry. I spent a month, years ago, in Ballinskelligs at Irish college, living on the bread and jam that was all we seemed to be fed by our bean an tí, attempting to speak Irish and going for gorgeous walks to secret spots where we would try our hands at smoking. And, although I've given up smoking, the landscape has stayed with me.
Still, the art world can look down on landscape painting, dismissing it as purely decorative, unless there is some sort of undercutting irony, element of abstraction or added intellectualism to it. I remember an artist I know once exhibiting a selection of "pastiche Irish landscapes" and being caught between dismay and delight when tourists, who didn't realise about the pastiche part, loved them and the show sold out. But alongside the kind of exhibitions run at galleries such as the RHA, the Douglas Hyde, Imma and the Glucksman, contemporary artists in Ireland are painting the land, and finding different ways of looking at, and different ways of seeing, this country.
At Greenlane Gallery in Dingle, Susan Callery is showing work by a group of artists from west Co Kerry that includes Liam O'Neill, Michael Flaherty, Tomás Ó Cíobháin and Patsy Farr. All of their work is unmistakeably of the area, but they all also bring a personal vision and stamp. Callery, who set up the gallery in 1992, is determined to establish a market and identity for the west Co Kerry artists, and they are a market and identity she is also keen to bring to an international audience with her newest venture, a branch of the Greenlane on Île St Louis, in Paris.
The connection between Dingle and Paris may not seem immediate, but many Irish artists, among them Nathaniel Hone, Roderic O'Conor and Walter Osbourne, left Ireland to find a softer beauty in the French landscape. Callery, who was originally scouting London for a location for the second Greenlane Gallery, says Île St Louis is the perfect site. London was the "serious" choice. It's not that she isn't taking her Paris venture seriously, but, she says: "I enjoy Paris so much and have so much fun over there. The whole thing has been so easy, the neighbours are friendly and people have bent over backwards to help me. My French is appalling, but I'm making the effort, and, when they see that, they're happy to help me out."
The Île St Louis, which is an oasis of quiet in the heart of a busy city, is one of Paris's particularly fashionable areas. Full of cafes, bistros, and little galleries and antiques shops, the Greenlane will face some stiff competition.
"I do know the arts scene in Paris is difficult to crack, but because of the location, and because of the artists I have, I think it's a viable proposition. I didn't go over with the intention of trying to break into the French market or of picking up only Parisian customers," she says. "But, like Dingle, the Île St Louis is full of tourists for eight months of the year, and I'm finding that they, and the French, love the Irish, and love Ireland as a destination."
Callery sees the gallery as an opportunity to introduce the artists she works with to a new audience, and she also hopes to work with the city's Irish Cultural Institute to develop this. As an added lure, she is showing images of Dingle and the surrounding landscape on a monitor in the window of her Paris gallery. "People really appreciate the rugged beauty of Dingle. Every time I come home from Paris I'm bombarded by the beauty of the place. I see it fresh each time I get back."
Just as importantly, says Callery, "the artists are excited about showing their work in Paris, and I'm able to offer them a place to work as well as to exhibit. In addition to investing in the gallery I have an apartment there, so artists can stay and get a feel for the city and the audience the new gallery is attracting. I have a place for them to work set up there, so it's an exciting and enjoyable addition to all of our lives. The artists are finding it inspirational to be able to work between two such beautiful locations."
Paris is no longer the centre of the art world, as far as the contemporary market goes, but that's not the market Callery is after. "There is a lot of other work in the gallery, but for the moment I'm concentrating on west Kerry. It's where I'm from and it's what I love. But that's just the beginning."
Callery is discovering that sculpture is very popular with her French audience. Equally popular at home are works that she picks up in the south of France, where she also has a home, to sell during the summer to the tourists who come to Dingle. But is that enough to ask of art? Should there be a layer of "cleverness" to add to the beauty of a scene before we can take it seriously? Why should the closely observed and emotively rendered need the art world's weight of critical and aesthetic theory before its value can be "officially" admitted? Art generally needs something to lift it beyond the purely decorative. Otherwise, after a while, like the lid of a pretty chocolate box, you forget to look at it.
But the artists in Callery's exhibition have that. Their work can have a power to bring you in, and it's a power that matches the landscape that has inspired it. In Dingle last week I went horseriding. We climbed the side of a mountain, went along a ridge that seemed impossibly high, and where the wind blew all conversation away, and then went down, through grass and boggy lowlands to the beach to gallop through the water. We came to a halt at a headland, where Fungie the dolphin swam over to say hello.
Faced with such a landscape in all its changing beauty, attempts to avoid the cliches of painting, and of language, don't seem to matter so much. Sitting on the horse on the ridge, and again at the beach with the waves coming in, I wondered how you would even begin to think about capturing the constantly changing images. And I realised why many artists don't bother, and why many others know that they have to, at the very least, lay the ghost of Peig, and try.
The Greenlane Gallery is at Holy Ground, Dingle, Co Kerry (066-9152018, www.greenlanegallery.com) and 29 Rue des Deux Ponts, Île St Louis (00-33-1-43250849). Susan Callery and her Paris gallery feature in House Hunters in the Sun on RTÉ1 next month