The nuts and bolts of the Giant's Causeway

Reviewed:

Causeway: Richard Kingston, Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, from February 3rd to March 16th (01-6612558);

Causeway II: Richard Kingston, Solomon Gallery, Dublin, from February 6th to February 28th (01-6794237)

When Richard Kingston began to think about painting the Giant's Causeway, he wondered why so few artists had tackled it. After all, there it was, a visually striking, ready-made, iconic Irish landmark. But apart from works like Susanna Drury's meticulous topographical views, painted around 1739, and of course umpteen photographic studies endlessly reproduced in a variety of formats for tourists, visual artists have tended to steer clear of it.

The problem is that it's such an icon. How do you take something that is indelibly stamped on the collective consciousness and in some way make it your own?

In fact, though he has travelled and painted extensively throughout Ireland, and though he'd always been intrigued by the Causeway, Kingston himself came to it relatively late, in the 1980s (he was born in 1922). But he was, he recalls, stunned when he actually saw it. The strange thing about it is that it is an entirely natural phenomenon that looks anything but. To Kingston's eyes, it resembled the remains of an ancient city. Over a period of time, he came to appreciate that this initial impression was misleading. What the eye immediately interpreted as order gradually revealed itself to be chaotic.

His approach to it through his drawings and paintings followed a similar sequence. He began by hexagonal columns - but soon lost interest. He might almost have been responding to Goethe's cautionary edict about the dangers of getting carried away by theory: "Do not try to get behind the phenomena. They themselves are the doctrine."

What engaged Kingston was the dynamic, visually dazzling interaction of light, weather and tides with this frankly implausible landscape of rock pillars. But once engaged, he was in for the long haul and, from 1982 to 2000, the setting inspired an enormous and impressive body of work which forms the central focus of Causeway, an exhibition of his work that opens next Saturday at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, and Causeway II, which opens at the Solomon Gallery next week.

Kingston studied arts and engineering at Trinity, an unusual combination that perfectly reflects the character of his imagination. His fascination with both appearance and process, with how things work, emerges through paintings which explore the optics of light on water and the mechanics of water flooding over stone. These are enduring preoccupations for him, as is demonstrated by the work that makes up the rest of the Gallagher Gallery exhibition, and forms a concise retrospective survey of his formidable output from 1949 onwards.

He grew up on a farm in Brittas, within sight of the sea, and spent a great deal of time outdoors, helping his father break horses, among other tasks. He obviously looked around intently as well, at plants, at the action of tides and at shifting atmospheric effects, given that the nuts and bolts of nature have formed such a staple concern in his artistic work. It was, he recalls, during the economic war, and times were tough, which may partly explain why he never became fixated on a romanticised view of landscape.

Rather he has been eager to address nature on a practical level, and is as interested in the urban world, a world shaped and dominated by technology. Clearly enraptured by aspects of engineering design (he worked as a designer for a time in London), one of his long-term interests is restoring classic cars. He regards them as sculptural objects with real aesthetic merit in their own right.

The experience of flight in a small plane in the 1950s was one of the direct influences on paintings that are definitely - and, for an artist on this side of the Atlantic, presciently - related to Abstract Expressionism. But Kingston never embraced the notion of the abstract sublime that underlies the more visionary work of the Abstract Expressionists. Hence, the way the fantastic energy of what might almost be an abstract, all-over composition, Bird and Plane, is tied firmly to the exhilaration of flight and neatly links the natural and the mechanical. He always applies pictorial ideas to things in the real world.

Driven by his roving, insatiable curiosity, energy never seems to have been a problem. He has never settled into a stylistic formula, and is most strongly motivated by the excitement of discovery. In 1995, for example, he found he wasn't able to paint landscape any more. He wasn't getting anything new out of it, so he stopped. Instead he began to think about why he liked nature, and painted the sprouting seed of a chestnut tree. Nature is never just an image, it's always process.

It's a little surprising to see the initials RHA after Kingston's name. He does not strike one as a typical academician. By temperament, he's an individualist if ever there was one, and it is hard to imagine him joining an organisation for so long associated with the maintenance of conservative aesthetic values. In fact, it was the artist Kitty Wilmer O'Brien who originally encouraged him to show at the RHA, and his inclusion was part of a conscious bid to open out the academy. He has certainly played a significant part in doing just that.