Hughie O'Donoghue has drawn on the paintings of Géricault and Friedrich, an Irish shipwreck and Nosferatu, writes Aidan Dunne
In heavy seas on March 8th, 1960, The Plassy, a freighter, ran aground on the Carraig na Finnise reef off the eastern shore of Inis Oirr. The islanders helped the crew to safety, and the continuing bad weather pushed the ship further up on to the beach, where it still remains. The wreck quickly became an attraction for visitors. A couple of years after the grounding, painter Hughie O'Donoghue's father took him and his two brothers on holiday to Inis Oirr. Though they lived in Manchester, the family revisited relations in Co Mayo every summer.
Setting off for Inis Oirr, O'Donoghue recalls: "I had no idea were I was going. It might have been the Caribbean for all I knew. I remember the sun was beating down and it seemed incredibly exotic. In fact it's usually been sunny whenever I've been on the Aran Islands." They went to see The Plassy. What struck him was the sheer scale of the beached ship, and being able to wander right up to it.
Now, the wreck of The Plassy plays a central role in his exhibition The Deep, one of the visual arts highlights of the Galway Arts Festival, which starts on Monday. The wreck has been a staple, versatile motif in his work for a number of years.
Photographs of the huge, looming hulk stood in for the Lancastria, a troopship that was sunk in St Nazaire with catastrophic loss of life in 1940, in some of the works O'Donoghue made under the general title The Fall of France. These were largely based on correspondence and diaries relating to his father's experience with the British Expeditionary Force. As with The Plassy, he tends to return to images again and again, employing them in different contexts and ways, all the time expanding a repertoire or family of motifs that are not tied to any one particular meaning.
There are two strands to The Deep. One is sited on Inis Oirr and consists of a group of smaller paintings based directly on the wreck of The Plassy. They are in the Áras Éanna Arts Centre, a short walk from the remains of the ship.
At Fairgreen Gallery in Galway, meanwhile, a group of seven spectacular, large-scale paintings take up the maritime theme in a more general way. Large-scale, by the way, means just that. O'Donoghue is known as a painter who relishes big canvases, and it is as if his images are shaped and nourished by rich, expansive grounds of appropriately earthy hues. The figures in them, larger than life, have a heightened sense of reality about them. Technically, he is an amazingly good painter.
The largest work, The Tomb of the Diver, features a diving figure suspended in a vertical column of light above the ruins of a war-torn city, its buildings reduced to ruins. It is a powerful, eloquent image, and it draws on myriad sources. For one thing, he began it immediately after September 11th. He was haunted by news photographs of people diving from the Twin Towers. As it happened, he was in Italy that September, and visited the Tomb of the Diver in Paestum. On the tomb, a painting depicts a figure diving from a tower.
"The image is incomplete, but one interpretation is that the tower we see is part of a representation of the Pillars of Hercules."
It could be that the deceased diver is plunging into the underworld, caught momentarily between two worlds.
YET IN THE complex genealogy of O'Donoghue's imagery, his diver also relates to a third-century statue of Marsyas, the satyr whose grisly fate it was to be flayed alive. A postcard of the sculpture was among his father's wartime papers. It also recalls other mementoes of his father, and his own Sleepers, paintings of figures embedded in bog, inspired by the preserved bodies recovered from peatlands. The ruined city is Monte Cassino, reduced with the monastery above it to rubble in the course of a terrible and costly battle in 1944.
The motif of a central, sacrificial figure is a constant in O'Donoghue's painting, a hapless protagonist subject to and struggling against a catalogue of catastrophe, the all-too-personal forces of history. But whereas previously he had more specifically addressed the legacy of the history of the 20th century, in the form of elegiac meditations on hardship, emigration and the second World War, The Tomb of the Diver and his more recent work is unmistakably about an ominous present.
The Plassy too, rusted and disintegrating, is an emblem of unease and takes its place in a formidable painterly lineage, from Caspar David Freidrich's Wreck of the Hope to Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa.
Géricault's painting, O'Donoghue remarks, "was once shown in Dublin". Picturing the huge work planted solidly at home in Paris, that seems hard to believe, but in 1820, disappointed that the state hadn't bought his epic, Géricault toured it to London, Edinburgh and Dublin. "It was set up in a tent in the Phoenix Park, but apparently the response was very disappointing. Not many people came to see it."
O'Donoghue's Raft paintings are conscious nods to Géricault, with The Plassy taking on the mantle of the doomed Medusa. Géricault's painting is a tragic aftermath, but the dominant note in O'Donoghue's is a sense of foreboding. He is not prescriptive about the meaning of his work. Rather he draws instinctively on his material, obsessively engaged with a subject, working through things until he feels he has what he's after. And he admits to a typically wide range of influences feeding into The Plassy paintings, including, tellingly, "The Demeter, the ship that carries Dracula's coffin to Whitby in Murneau's film, Nosferatu." Perhaps the dark, looming bulk of The Plassy recalled for him the atmospheric monochrome of Murneau's expressionist imagery.
SOME YEARS BACK, the photographic artist Anthony Hobbs and O'Donoghue devised a way of incorporating photographic prints in paintings. Printed on fine Japanese paper, the images are fixed to the canvas like a membrane and physically become part of the painting. Since he began to work with photographs they have become more and more important. The Diver is, typically, an amalgam of paint and photography, and recent works use photographic images to an even greater degree, including photographs staged and taken by the artist himself as well as archive images.
He is quite comfortable about these "hybrid, mixed images". "I suppose it's a newer idiom for me in that the paintings are very much a synthesis of mechanically generated images and painting. I feel: why not make each of them do what they do best? It can seem somehow false to paint and arrive at what is in essence a photographic image. I would have painted the figures prior to this, yet using the photographs has actually freed up the activity of painting for me."
Yet there are occasions when he must feel his way towards an image in paint. And it is striking how well the photographic elements are integrated into the fabric of the painting. One of the things O'Donoghue likes about photography is that it is part of our cultural vernacular. "There is a feeling that you have to be attuned to the language of painting to appreciate it, but no one feels that about photography." His work is, he hopes, immediately and widely accessible.
• The Deep is at the Fairgreen Gallery, Galway and Áras Éanna Arts Centre, Inis Oirr from Jul 17-30, www.galwayartsfestival.ie