Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne reviews: Cuba: A Naive Portrait, CHQ until July 8 (086-8093597) Celebrating Gerald, Hillsboro Fine Art, 3 Anne's Lane, South Anne Street This Hallowed Evening, paintings by Melita Denaro, Taylor Gallery (01-6766055).
Apparently Waterford-based artist Pat Murphy had long been fascinated by Cuba before he set off on a three-month walking tour of the country. He was accompanied by Bonnie Dempsey, a young film-maker who chronicled his travels and is working on a documentary account of them titled Cuban Portrait: Travels with the artist Pat Murphy. In the meantime, you can see much of the work Murphy made in Cuba, and you can see him making some of it, in Cuba: A Naive Portrait at CHQ, close to the FSC in Docklands, a show organised by Waterford's enterprising Dyehouse Gallery. As part of the show, which has proven to be extremely popular, extracts from Dempsey's footage is being screened on four monitors.
Murphy, who lives in the Ring Gaeltacht and is a gifted draughtsman in the mould of Charles Cullen, cuts a striking figure as Our Man in Havana. Wraith-thin, he shelters behind flowing locks, a prolific beard and specs.
At work on the street in Cuba, he converses with curious passers-by, remarking, rightly enough in this case, that language is a barrier to communication and that images are better. Certainly the incidental audiences he attracts as he works his way at a leisurely pace through the towns and countryside seem warmly responsive to what he is doing.
What he is doing, ambitiously, is to create a variant of a Chinese scroll painting, a pictorial narrative based on his travels. Given that the component parts of this epic work on paper are metres long, it was an optimistic undertaking. On screen, you can see him battling successfully, on site, with this difficult format.
Previously, his characteristic style could be described as brooding and introspective, quite low key and dark. Like Cullen, he was influenced by the virtuoso German graphic artist Horst Jensen.
Cuba prompted some significant adjustments, introducing light and colour in big way. But he doesn't give up his penchant for pushing expressive distortion to extremes. The fact that he is making a picaresque narrative based on a road trip (and the eventual film will be a road movie in essence) brings to mind Gerald Scarfe's illustrations for Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing. A comparison is apt, except that Murphy is freer in the graphic liberties he takes and, in place of the loathing, there is an unmistakable liking for the spirit and joie de vivre of the Cubans which, incidentally, comes across strongly in the film footage.
He works fast, with great verve, sometimes opting for collaged photographs in lieu of illustrative description. Separately from the scroll format, he made a series of portraits of individuals. They are audaciously concise, but really vivid and effective. Behind the idea of graphic work and film is the strong possibility that both convey a picture of Cuba just prior to a moment of major change. Murphy and Dempsey have provided us with vibrant, vivid accounts of the way things are.
Hillsboro Fine Art's Celebrating Gerald is a tribute to the late Gerald Davis, who died just over a year ago. Davis was an essential and fondly regarded presence in the Irish cultural world on many levels. He would have protested long and loudly at it being thus described, but his playing the roll of Leopold every Bloomsday could be seen as a species of performance art.
After all, he did stage painting performances in collaboration with Louis Stewart (record production was another of his endeavours). He enjoyed an easy, entirely unaffected affinity with the work of Joyce and Beckett. Academics might have struggled to understand them both, he remarked once, but any real Dubliner would have no problems with either. Their language, their speech, their jokes, he contended, all emerged from the texture of the city.
As a painter, Davis was drawn to another central artistic personality in Ireland: Jack B Yeats. The influence of Yeats is very evident in much of the work assembled for the Hillsboro show. It's noticeable particularly in Davis's approach to figuration. Although associated with the Irish landscape, Yeats was not really a landscape painter per se. He liked drama, and usually the landscape in his paintings was something of a theatrical backdrop to a highly charged narrative.
Davis's figures draw on Yeats's gestural swirls, and they add a dash of Beckettian mise en scene. He had an instinctive sympathy for the stage presence of Beckett's characters.
All that said, one of the nice things about this show is how well Davis emerges as a landscape painter. There are many beautiful, sensitive examples of pure landscape that suggest a real feeling for the grain of the Wild West, in a spirit akin to that of Sean McSweeney. This is an appropriate tribute to a remarkable talent who will, one suspects, be commemorated again in exhibitions still to come.
Melita Denaro, whose This Hallowed Evening is at the Taylor Gallery, follows an extraordinary routine. She spends 10 days of every month in the north of Donegal, at the Isle of Doagh on Inishowen, travelling there and back by car from her alternative home in London. At Doagh, she makes her way to the same vantage point every day and, more or less regardless of the weather (within reason), makes paintings of the land and sea surrounding her. Given the location, this means that she makes paintings of, substantially, the weather, not unlike Stuart Shils, the American painter who has developed an annual habit of visiting north Mayo.
Denaro's paintings are made with tremendous pace and energy. She always goes for the essence of what is before her, not in any mystical or mysterious sense but in that she trusts her eyes, not trying to paint what she knows something looks like, to fit into our preconceptions. That is why Constable's oil sketches of skies come to mind in relation to what she does.
Strikingly, she accompanies each painting with a telegraphese commentary, which links the experience of the day's work with the wider context of her life on Doagh. These bold accounts of a beautiful place are grounded in the minutiae of daily life and friendships and the stoical presence of the animals in the fields.
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