A truly modest teacher-painter from the Old School

Walter Verling has stuck with his own style for 60 years, and considers himself an amateur, but his work suggests otherwise, writes Aidan Dunne.

IT'S FAIR TO DESCRIBE Walter Verling, whose retrospective is at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, as Old School. It's not just that throughout the 60 years that the exhibition encompasses he has consistently adhered to a particular form of plein airrealist painting with its roots early in the 19th century. More than that, he is in many respects representative of an Ireland that predates not only the Celtic Tiger, but also the era of Seán Lemass and TK Whitaker.

This is not to wax sentimental about the good old days but, despite the economic and other ills of the time, Verling's experience reflects some of the more positive aspects of pre-modernised Ireland. Those aspects include a belief in the value of education and public service, and a highly developed sense of place, of local identity and community.

Verling, a formidable man with a teacher's authority and a wry sense of humour, was born in New Ross in Co Wexford in 1930, and has spent most of his life in parts of the southwest and west. He studied at the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork and he went on to become an art teacher, living and working in Clonmel, Fermoy and Youghal. He spent several years living in Connemara in the mid-1960s while teaching in Carraroe and then settled in Limerick, where he taught for 20 years as head of art education at the Mary Immaculate College of Education.

He painted throughout his career as a teacher, though obviously his professional commitments limited the time he could devote to his own work. He is philosophical rather than resentful about this. "I couldn't be anything more than an amateur," he says matter-of-factly and, given the body of work he has to his credit, modestly. For him, to have been a professional artist would have meant getting out of teaching: "And I didn't get out." Not that he's unhappy about it.

Looking back, he says he feels privileged to have been involved with successive generations of students. "They were generally very bright young people," he recalls. "I see them as a cross-section of what rural Ireland was like at its best, really. It's less like that now, perhaps. There are different pressures and expectations." He remains particularly attached to Connemara, valuing his time there which gave him, he reckons, a taste of "the last layer of the Gaelic Revival" before the region changed out of all recognition. It also brought him into contact with painter Charles Lamb, for whose work he has the highest regard. He admired the way Lamb headed off into the landscape and worked on the spot - his own preferred way of working, and something he feels quite strongly about. As a teacher, he relished the six weeks every summer when he could paint on a daily basis and remembers the frustration of having to head back to town.

His own education was, he recalls, extremely conservative and craft-orientated, so that he had to pursue his desire to paint, in a specific way, very much on his own initiative. Aged 13 or so, he recalls becoming absolutely possessed with the notion of capturing a particular view of Cork Harbour, even though he'd never painted before, and that instinct has stayed with him, not least in the sense that his way of working and what he is trying to do have, he reckons, remained essentially unchanged over the years.

What he tries to do is encapsulated in the work of the great French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, who visited Italy in the 1820s and, instead of confining himself to studying the Old Masters in the museums and churches, headed out into the Roman Campagna and made wonderfully alert, vivid studies directly from the landscape. Yet while Corot's paintings are spontaneous responses to his surroundings, they also have a settled precision about them, an architectonic solidity, because of the way the bewildering complication of the visual world is organised within strict pictorial constraints.

Verling knew from early on that he had a feeling for landscape, and he has sought to develop and refine it, while remaining a forthright critic of his own work. He has strict ground rules for how he goes about painting. The work must be made on the spot, while he is directly engaged with the scene in front of him. It's an instinctive process, dependent on any number of factors: on the prevailing conditions, on his level of fluency with means and materials, even on luck.

"You let the painting go," he says, "and you try to keep up with it, to stay with it." If you see one or two of his paintings in isolation, you could be forgiven for thinking that he works self-consciously within the constraints of a particular, picturesque genre. In fact, he is what might be described as an unreconstructed 19th-century realist and classicist, something that becomes clearer the more of his work you see. Landscape is his subject, even though he has digressed on occasion to interiors and figures. His preferred palette has an agreeable chalky character and is tonally very controlled and precise in a way that Corot would surely approve of. The paintings themselves are not only well made but exceptionally likable and cheering.

Verling is not quite an outsider in the context of Irish art. He is too well known and respected among a wide circle of artists, friends and collectors for that to be the case. But, a genuinely modest man, neither has he been quite given his due as an estimable Irish landscape painter. This retrospective and its accompanying publication should go some way towards enhancing his reputation among a wider public. It is also an enormously enjoyable exhibition.

Walter Verling - Sixty Year Retrospective, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Pery Sq. Until Aug 28