Bright light from outside

He may have gained critical and academic success, but West Cork-based artist Graham Crowley still considers himself part of the counter-culture, writes AIDAN DUNNE

VISITING GRAHAM CROWLEY’S exhibition at the Ashford Gallery is like being in a hitherto darkened room that’s suddenly illuminated by a brilliant shaft of light. His paintings are landscapes of typical Irish rural settings: bodies of water, roads, fields bounded by hedgerows, stands of trees, single houses sporadically distributed and – of course – a stretch of suburban housing incongruously parachuted into a pastoral setting. In almost every case, though, the underlying colour is bright to the point of fluorescence, a crimson, a glowing yellow or an electric blue, their reflections shimmering in the room’s glossy floor.

Apart from each work’s single dominant hue, colour is minimal.

Detail is spelled out in shades of Payne’s grey. Yet Crowley manages brilliantly to convey the characteristically lively fall of light across the complex detail of the countryside, and the paintings have a sparkling vitality to them. A bit like Crowley himself, who is wiry and energetic and talks at a breakneck pace, moving seamlessly from one subject to another. He hopes, he says, that visiting his show you’ll feel “as if you’ve woken up in a beautifully lit world”. The exhibition coincides with the publication of an illustrated monograph, Graham Crowley, by Martin Holman (Lund Humphries, €40), which surveys his life and work to date.

Most of the places that feature in the paintings are close to Crowley’s home in West Cork, between Union Hall and Castletownsend – in fact his own house features in at least two. He and his wife, Sally Townshend, bought the house in 1994 and regularly spent time there before making it their permanent home four years ago, when he moved on from an eight-year stint as Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art in London. His ties with Cork run deep, despite his East End accent. His grandfather was Irish and Crowley has identified with Cork ever since his first visit in 1969.

He was born in Romford in Essex in 1950. His parents, he says with disconcerting directness, were people who managed to “forget” their origins and heritage because they might stand in the way of assimilation. This meant a virtual rejection of inherited identity.

Apart from the Irish antecedents there was a Polish, Jewish background. All were eclipsed by a vehement, even xenophobic Englishness. “We were”, Crowley says, “culturally rootless.” Furthermore, there was a distrust of cultural expression in literary, musical or visual form. He grew up in a bookless household and perhaps partly in consequence quickly came to love books, passionately, which he still does. He drew, and he built and painted Airfix model kits, and model railways with carefully detailed landscapes: “To the point of obsessiveness,” he notes.

A turning point, perhaps the turning point, came when he decided to go to art school. His parents were horrified. “They told me there’d be no coming back, no home to go back to if I went.” He went anyway, and the rift with his parents has never healed (his mother is no longer alive). It was 1968 and he was accepted at St Martins in London when the school, and indeed London, was in a state of creative ferment. What was it like? “It was like – you know the Maoist slogan about personal and perpetual revolution? Well that describes it. You felt you could do anything, you had to challenge everything. Never be complacent. I’ve never lost that, really. It was liberating, but you also learned that with liberty comes responsibility.” He studied painting. Gillian Ayres and Henry Mundy were tutors.

On the theoretical side, he was particularly impressed with the film critic and theorist Raymond Durgnat, who was teaching there. St Martins, he reckons, was educationally “incredible” at the time. It was while he was there that he visited Ireland. Hitching around, he found himself in Skibbereen, and liked it. “It was amazing. There were lots of alternative types, really quite serious hippies, from Europe.

“We’re talking trepanation, you know, people with quite far out ideas.” After St Martins he went on to complete an MA at the Royal College of Art, which was – in a good way – in a stage of transition. He is full of praise for Peter de Francia and John Golding, the painter and writer, who were on the staff. He began to exhibit regularly, becoming a frequent presence in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition (he won the John Moores Prize in 2006 with Red Reflection which is in his show at the Ashford). In the meantime he worked in a variety of occupations, including painting and decorating, and picture framing, to support himself. He and Townshend married in 1978, and their sons, Robin and Pearce, were born in the first half of the 1980s.

His work is notable for, as he puts it, its “stylistic promiscuity”. He identifies with a particular strain in British culture, an anarchic spirit of inventiveness. It was evident in punk, ranging across art, fashion, music and film and political activism, he says, but he also points to Oliver Postgate, the animator who made Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine. “Those films were basically made in a shed in the garden from scratch. Postgate had this wonderful hand-made aesthetic. I see him as one of the precursors of punk, really.” Crowley shares that hand-made, DIY aesthetic and a distrust of conformism. Early on he identified conceptualism as the coming orthodoxy and gravitated firmly towards painting. In the 1970s he re-worked Cubism, investing it with a graphic, comic-strip spirit. That spirit became much darker in his dense, Dickensian canvases during the Thatcher years, when he described a society in the throes of drastic and ominous transformation. Classical Dutch painting has been a recurrent source of reference and influence, and is evident in his floral paintings in the 1990s – again an unlikely subject to turn to – and in his landscapes.

HIS CV MAKES INTERESTING READING. He has been a perennial visiting lecturer, advisor and board member, and artist-in-residence at myriad prestigious institutions, including the RCA, Winchester, Goldsmiths, Kingston University, Oxford University, the British School at Rome, the ICA, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the City and Guilds of London Art School. Yet remarkably, he points out that his first fulltime job was as Professor of Painting at the RCA, a post he took up in 1998. It is as if he never gave up on the counter-cultural position he adopted in the late 1960s.

He agrees. “I know. I think if you look at my track record, there is something of an outsider thing going on there. I mean, at a certain stage I felt that I had done the institutional approval bit, got the badges and so on, and then, shock! At some point it dawns on you that you have to do that for the rest of your life. But the visiting lectureships, the residences, I’ve really enjoyed them. I’m not obsessed with official approval though.” Last year he became involved in a public spat with John Tusa, the broadcaster and Chairman of the University of the Arts in London.

Crowley wrote bemoaning the state of art education in Britain in Art Monthly, initiating a debate that still continues. He lashed out at the “politicisation of higher education” and the imposition of a managerial culture. He feels instinctively that art education has been damaged by academicisation and bureaucracy. Managers and bureaucrats, he feels, have only a facile, superficial knowledge of art practice.

“To my mind,” he says bluntly, “art schools are worth practically nothing if dissent is marginalised.” Art is, he argues, analytical of society, of people, of life, though it can be so in ways that are not immediately obvious, and certainly not to those with no sympathy for the arts to begin with. “In art education, what really matters is empathy. We have to be able to do that. People who are good at it know that, they do it. But I think that now more than ever we have to begin to articulate it as a methodology.”

Graham Crowley’s paintings are at the Ashford Gallery, Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place, Dublin 2 until November 22nd