AFFORDABLE ART:There is a perception that prints are the poor relations of the art world, but one studio in particular is proving the naysayers wrong, with the enthusiastic support of some of Ireland's most respected artists
HIDDEN AWAY, almost under the railway lines that come into Connolly Station in Dublin, is Stoney Road Press. This is an unusual sort of artists’ studio. It’s full of the fascination of a studio – for here is where work gets made, and where that almost magical process that turns ideas and images from the imagination into marks on a page occurs. Artists’ studios are captivating places; you find sheets of pristine paper, blank canvases, pots or tubes of paint, objects that the artist has gathered (some peculiar, some familiar), and fragments of work, the sketches and abandoned canvases, as well as finished works. They’re generally not terribly tidy, although Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, famous for his geometric lines and coloured squares, was so fanatical about his own studio that he would apparently get upset if even an ashtray was moved.
Stoney Road is different in that it is not the studio of a single artist, but a print studio, where some of Ireland’s finest artists (including Louis le Brocquy, Charles Cullen, William Crozier, Alice Maher, Anne Madden and Donald Teskey) have come to create work. This means that there is more order to the chaos of creating, but there are exciting discoveries too. There is a Brian O’Doherty print clipped to the wall and spread out on a table are the separate plates, each with a different coloured ink, which combine to make the finished image.
There are also clues to the work I have come here to see – a page that had fallen from a family Bible many years ago, and the remains of what was once 10,000 sheets of gold leaf, brought here from China. The page is part of the inspiration for a new series of work by Dorothy Cross, and the gold is for Patrick Scott.
Famous for his beautiful and spare paintings, where gold and silver lines and shapes hover on bare, unprimed canvas, Scott is one of Ireland’s most respected artists, and James O’Nolan and David O’Donoghue, who run Stoney Road, have been working with him on different projects since their studio opened in 2002. In February, they held an exhibition of his work at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, which will be shown in Kilkenny later this summer. O’Nolan and O’Donoghue had come up with the idea for Stoney Road over a cup of coffee in 2001; O’Nolan is an artist, printmaker and former director of the Graphic Studio in Dublin, and O’Donoghue was running a gallery (the pair actually met when O’Nolan was O’Donoghue’s print tutor at the National College of Art and Design). Their idea was for a studio where artists who didn’t necessarily work in print could come and make prints.
“You try to find a different means for every artist, so that they can work as near to the way they usually work,” says O’Nolan. In practice, this means that layers of textured carborundum plates build up colour for an Anne Madden print, while die-cut sheets of metal stamp the embossed lines of a Patrick Scott, and photographic printing lays down elements of the image for a Dorothy Cross work. Print is sometimes (and unfairly) considered as a lesser medium than, say, paint. This is because the process means that instead of one individual work, you get an edition (in the case of Stoney Road, usually up to 50). But as soon as you get over the idea that something isn’t as special because there’s more than one of it, print comes into its own as it’s a more affordable way to buy art. Stoney Road generally works by not charging the artists for their work, and instead takes half the edition as payment, which means there is also a great deal of terrific work available at Stoney Road.
O’Nolan, who describes the process of working with the different artists as trying to make himself “invisible”, had his own work in the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) last year, but, as he says, “my work as an artist is separate. In some print studios, artists come in and there’s a menu of the things they can do, but we try to make it so that the artist can work in the way they normally work, so that what you get is a Pat Scott, and not a hybrid between a Pat Scott and what the studio can do.”
Scott describes the process slightly differently. O’Nolan, he says, “is an absolute inspiration. It was the way that he saw things I could do with my work in print.” Scott had done some screen prints years before, and had tried to get some prints made in gold leaf, but had been told by other studios that the process was too complex and expensive. He remembers Kelvin Mann, one of the printmakers at Stoney Road, spending the whole summer just doing the gold on Scott’s Méditations series. “I said to him ‘You must have gone mad with boredom doing that,’ and he said, ‘Not at all, I had the BBC on and I was listening to the cricket.’ ”
Scott was born in 1921, and trained initially as an architect. He worked with Michael Scott (no relation) on Busáras in Dublin, and we have him to thank for its mosaics. While working with Michael Scott, he was also responsible for designing the paintwork for Iarnród Éireann’s trains, their orange, black and white livery having been inspired (he says) by his cat, Miss Mouse.
Quite by chance, Scott met up with the artists known as the White Stag Group when he came across an exhibition they were holding on Baggot Street in 1940. “I showed my first picture with them when I was 19,” he remembers. “I’d never thought of having an art exhibition, though I was always painting as a schoolboy. It gave me confidence, and life was much more fun with that gang. It was as liberating as could be.”
Scott’s work is influenced by Buddhism, imagery from Japan, ideas from mysticism, and the shapes and spaces of Ireland. Looking at the recent, beautiful book from Liberties Press on his work, you can see how patterns behind the images in his work from the 1940s have moved to become the sparer shapes in his art today. “I discovered the meditative side of it years ago,” he says. “I was given a loan of a cottage in Kerry, just a very simple plain whitewashed cottage, and in the bedroom upstairs there was nothing on the wall. I drew a circle in charcoal on the wall and I suddenly felt at home.”
Talking to Scott is an utter pleasure; not only are his anecdotes warm and telling of a time in Ireland that is passing into history, but he is absolutely charming, funny, thoughtful and wise. He tells me how he overcame the dreaded artists’ block (was it scary? “Oh yes”), by separating himself from the work he was making. He attached fabric to the end of a stick, “like a whip”, and lashed paint on to the canvas. “I beat it out. I did that in my house in the mountains, and it made a terrible mess, and of course it made a terrible mess of me too. So I stripped off my clothes, beating these things out around the house, in the middle of nowhere. And it worked, but it was the only time I was making work that I didn’t have absolute control over.”
Back in the Stoney Road studio, Scott’s images are either framed or in special boxed sets, while Dorothy Cross’s prints are still hanging up to dry. They are a series of five, based, says the artist, “on the five senses”. In them, the lines of the old Bible engraving are contrasted with the swirling shapes of the sea.
“Working with the guys was absolutely fabulous,” says Cross, who first worked with the studio when it printed her contribution to the Hugh Lane Gallery anniversary collection last year. Cross was born in Cork in 1956, and she represented Ireland in the 1993 Venice Biennale. Cross made her mark in the 1990s with a series of sculptures using cow hide and udders, which were sort of sexy in an unsettling way. Her recent work has had a lot to do with the sea. There was Ghost Ship, which many will remember haunting Dublin Bay a decade ago. In his 2008 film About Beauty, Conor Horgan followed Cross to New Ireland, a tiny island off Papua New Guinea, and filmed her.
Cross combines an incisive mind with the ability to see more than the surfaces of what she is looking at. So how did she find working on this new set of prints? “James [O’Nolan] has the skills I needed to complete the prints, although I had studied print myself – for three years during a Masters of Fine Arts in San Francisco.” As Cross describes it, print is a special way of working: “There’s something about the pace of print that makes it different. Print can be used as a tool, but when it’s done in its own right, you can come up with amazing results.”
Meanwhile, the studio at Stoney Road is still busy. There is a print on the presses by Hughie O’Donoghue to coincide with his current exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma), while on April 13th, another print, this time made in a collaboration between Seamus Heaney and Barrie Cooke, and signed by both the poet and the artist, will be launched at Imma to celebrate Heaney’s birthday.
Dorothy Cross’ set of prints are available from Stoney Road Press, and will be on show in its gallery in April. Patrick Scott’s Méditations will be at the Blackbird Gallery in Kilkenny in August. www.stoneyroadpress.com