Some 22 years after painting the jungles of Borneo for an exhibition that was a landmark in his career, Barrie Cooke has been back in the rain forest. This time, though, the landscape that forms the subject of his work is the spectacular fastness of New Zealand's South Island, a place that has become something of a retreat. He has made the long-haul round trip half a dozen times in the last 10 years, relishing the space, the unspoilt terrain and, not least, the incomparable trout fishing.
For he was drawn there, as he will cheerfully admit he is drawn to most places, for the fishing. As a passion, trout fishing is not only on a par with painting for him; the two are inextricably linked. It is as if fishing is his passport into the natural arena that feeds his art. It leads him to places where he otherwise would not go, and in a sense it gives him the right to be there.
He has painted New Zealand before, but not the region he explores in the fantastically lush body of work that makes up his current show at the Kerlin Gallery. "It's the west coast, the wet, jungly part of the island that I started visiting about three or four years ago," he explains. "It's quite striking because from the east you go from desert to alpine scenery, with snow and glaciers, and then you're in this densely vegetated area with high rainfall. Suddenly everything is overwhelmingly green, with mosses, tree ferns and huge masses of native beech that are almost impenetrable."
It is the kind of saturated landscape that he instinctively identifies with, but prior to this year he had a problem painting it. "With a few exceptions, I felt I was never able to do much with it, because I didn't want to just re-do Borneo." And then, this year, in the space of a six-week stay, he found a line of approach.
Fittingly for a fisherman, rivers provided the key. Several of the numerous west coast rivers, the Karamea, the Little Wanganui, the Ihangahua, the Waitahu and the Waiau feature in the work. The Karamea and the Waiau snake between thickly forested banks, under towering hillsides. Some of the most exciting pieces in the show are virtuoso close-ups of clear water flowing over the golden-orange rock that forms the bed of the Little Wanganui. By contrast, there is the dark, peaty bed of the Ihangahua. And a trout stream is barely visible between a tangle of vegetation in Small Trees.
The latter picture is one of the earliest, and the one most reminiscent of the Borneo paintings, with its jagged rhythms and deep greens. The feeling it imparts of being among the shadowy undergrowth gives way to the airy expansiveness of the views of the river valleys, their steep sides alive with the glitter of sunlight on wet foliage. As ever, Cooke is subtle in achieving his effects. He only piles on the pigment in isolated flurries, preferring to build up the surface in thin washes, almost as if the oil paint were watercolour. Often he'll mix paint not on the palette but on the canvas, sliding in a wedge of white to get things going, or taking the chance of letting one colour bleed freely into another. But these economical means evoke extraordinary richness of texture and light, so that, as with Velazquez or Francis Bacon, it can be surprising to find that there isn't, after all, a thick skin of paint.
This is the New Zealand exhibition that Cooke has been working towards since he first started going there, so in a way it has been 10 years in the making. But the result is certainly his most concentrated, assured and visually beautiful body of work in ages. Though he is a restless spirit, he has been based in Ireland continuously since 1954. He was actually born in Cheshire, in 1931. Having grown up in the US and Bermuda, and studied at Harvard, he visited England to discover his roots, only to find that he didn't much care for them. Instead, he caught the ferry at Hollyhead and found the relaxed atmosphere in Ireland more amenable to his temperament.
From the start, his tendency to locate himself in the countryside, far from established cultural centres, has been at odds with the sensible management of his artistic career. But by his own definition he is a country person: "Country people live in the country and go on holiday to the city. City people live in the city and go on holiday to the country." First he lived near Kilnaboy on the River Fergus. Then, after he married Harriet Leviter, they moved to a remote cottage in Quin, Co Clare. After he and Harriet separated in 1964, with the Dutch ceramic artist Sonja Landweer he settled briefly in Kilkenny, and then in Thomastown. His most recent move was to a quiet corner of Co Sligo, to a house and studio overlooking Lough Arrow and the long slanted ridge of Carrowkeel beyond.
From the start his work has depended on a close, intimate contact with nature and has had a distinctly rural tone. Early paintings of slain animals, fiercely sensual Sheela-na-gigs, and studies of the patterns of fast-flowing water displayed great powers of natural observation. Not for nothing did he have a quotation from Heraclitus, "Everything flows", inscribed on the wall of his studio, and no one paints water and the sheer, pervasive wetness of the Irish rural landscape better - or with such evident relish. But in the long term his work alternates between wet and dry phases.
The fluidity of this period gave way to drier, more analytical anatomical studies of bone joints, culminating in his own sculptural form, the Bone Boxes. These are usually ceramic sculptural forms arranged in clear perspex containers. By the time he went to Borneo in 1975 he was making wet paintings again, evocations of the shadowy depths of tench lakes. His Borneo paintings and sculptures are startling for conveying a sense of pure biomass. They are accounts of the rain forest as life's feverish laboratory. He found versions of something similar closer to home in a series of lake and bog paintings, envisaging the compressed organic matter of the peat as a preserving medium for the hapless bog figures unearthed intact after many hundreds of years. Also extracted from the bog, the vast antlers of the great Irish elk tower like radio antennae in another series of work, transmitting a message through the centuries. The notion of a Western artist decamping to the southern oceans in search of an unspoilt tropical paradise inevitably invites comparison with Gauguin. But Cooke has never adhered to an idealised vision of either nature or culture. He brings the country dweller's unsentimental gaze to bear on the landscape around him and, as his friend the poet Ted Hughes once remarked: "It's extremely difficult to write about the natural word without finding your subject matter turning ugly."
Over the last decade, a great deal of Cooke's work has specifically addressed the problems that increasingly threaten the rural environment in which he lives and works. Unorthodoxly, his paintings have dealt with freshwater pollution issues like eutrophication and the discharge of sewage into the river system. He is also understandably concerned with problems engendered by fish farming, an industry so far shunned in New Zealand. Without a doubt, part of the appeal of New Zealand is the fact that it is relatively unspoilt. "It's less buggered up than most places," he acknowledges." More than that, though, the South Island is one of the few areas in the world that still harbours vast tracts of unpopulated, even unmapped wilderness. "There's one area that's still white on the map. There are no roads in, the only access is by water. The wildlife people have a survey vessel that houses eight. It's incredibly difficult to get one of those berths." Not surprisingly, his next project is to get on to that boat.
Barrie Cooke's paintings can be seen at the Kerlin Gallery until May 25th.
