Versatile artist with vision

THERE has been a tendency to take Brian Ferran rather for granted as a painter he is unassuming, industrious and a notable public servant, factors which do not as a rule make headlines. The two exhibitions mounted concurrently in Dublin should prove to the sceptical that he is a versatile artist who has never stood still, has his own vision and is a scrupulous craftsman.

Some of his roots at least lie in the 1960s so that here and there you may spot similarities to Peter Blake and other London painters of the time. Some nudes have the rather laid back detachment of that generation, though they are capably drawn and with a feeling for light. However, the earlier Ferran is often eclectic in style and seems to have felt a number of currents, with the result that in several of these earlier paintings a lot almost too much in fact seems to be happening at once.

However, the "London" Ferran was never more than on a skin deep, period level a person of the Pop culture or of international eclecticism. In recent years, his national roots have asserted themselves with whole series of works built around the Tain, the career of Colmcille, and Celtic mythology in general. He has also reacted to the history of his own province, Ulster, by painting a series of pictures based on Betsy Grey, the heroine of the battle of Ballynahinch and highly moving some of them are.

For an artist to tackle "subject" pictures such as this is courageously unfashionable and it is equally courageous for Ferran to tackle the Tain legend when Louis Le Brocquy has already put his stamp so firmly on it. However, his approach is totally different while Le Brocquy employs a kind of sophisticated primitivism, Ferran is more picturesque, more romantic, and more obviously and traditionally "Celtic". The Colmcille pictures, some of them highly ambitious and complex, are an intriguing attempt to combine the "subject" picture with modern quasi abstract forms and the modern autonomous picture surface, and the best of them succeed to the full in doing so.

Ferran has matured considerably as a colourist and a kind of floating, swimming aura pervades many of his recent pictures. He has also burgeoned as a landscapist (some of the Italian scenes in the RHA Gallery, though not recent, have real charm). It seems plain, too, that in recent years particularly in this decade, in fact a number of disparate strains have come together at last, making his style much more unified, and also simpler and stronger he now seems entirely sure of what he wants to say, and how. It is a relatively late maturity but it is proving a fruitful one.