By the watery light

OBSERVER: Charlie Brady's paintings eliminate any hint of drama orpretension - yet the eye is drawn to them, writes Aidan Dunne,as a retrospective of the New Yorker's Irish work begins at the RHA

The painter Charles Brady - everybody called him Charlie Brady - was born in New York City in 1926 and, although he lived in Ireland more or less from the time of his initial arrival here in 1956 until his death in 1997, he remained a New Yorker at heart. With his Columbo raincoats, his sardonic wit and laid-back manner, he never assimilated. He was always a transplanted New Yorker, amused and slightly bemused by the foibles of his adopted home.

While he enjoyed a measure of cultural detachment he was, all the same, supremely comfortable in Ireland, and during his time here he produced a body of work that, in its own understated, quietly subversive way, is second to none.

Latterly, he became an honourary academician, and it is appropriate that the RHA is to pay tribute to him with a small retrospective.

He was born and grew up in Brooklyn. When he began to paint, intrigued by the endlessly shifting atmospherics of light and colour on the Hudson, he made countless views of the river. During the second World War, he served with the US Navy and after the war decided to study art formally. Like many artists he began with a utilitarian, commercial end in view - fashion illustration - but, happily, discovered the egalitarian Art Students League and switched to study fine art there.

It was an exciting time in American art. The Abstract Expressionists were becoming recognised and, eventually, promoted, as an authentically American cultural movement.

Brady knew and got on well with some of the foremost Abstract Expressionists, notably Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.

But he was never, temperamentally, an abstract painter. In a way, his work can be seen as an intermittent, dissenting dialogue with the heroic era of American art of the 1950s and 1960s.

While early on, the dominant Abstract Expressionist style consisted of big, brash, dramatically gestural paintings, American painting became increasingly caught up with influential art critic Clement Greenberg's prescriptive formalist theories. Briefly, Greenberg argued that each art form progressively defines and refines itself in the direction of its own unique qualities.

He didn't exclude representation in painting but, as he saw it, the cardinal properties of painting were colour and the flatness of the pictorial surface. Anything that detracted from concentration on these properties should be excluded. It doesn't take too long to realise that such an exclusive formula must lead painting inexorably into a cul-de-sac. In the event Pop Art and various other developments thwarted Greenberg's grand plan.

Meanwhile, in 1956, Brady visited Ireland. Based here over the following couple of years, he toured around Britain and France and returned briefly to the US before coming back to settle in Ireland. In an unlikely move for a New Yorker, he lived initially in a cottage in Lismore, where he met his wife-to-be, Eelagh Noonan. After a year in Spain, they bought a house on Royal Terrace West in Dún Laoghaire, where they lived from 1962.

Most of his painting was done in a room in this house, where he worked by natural light. He was extremely sensitive to light, and often commented on his liking for the cloudy, diffuse, watery light of Ireland. It suited his penchant for mid-toned, soft-edged form in his painting.

Throughout the 1960s, he continued to exhibit in the US and began to show his work in Ireland, building up his reputation through participation in various group shows and solo outings at such venues as the Davis Gallery and the Arts Club. Then in 1978, he was signed up by the fledgling Taylor Gallery in what turned out to be the beginning of a long, loyal partnership.

While his painting is generally small in scale, low in contrast and quiet in colour and tonality, it has great presence. Almost because of its unshowy, muted character, it draws your eye to it. In Sean O Mordha's documentary on his life and work, Brady comments: "I prefer paintings that people discover for themselves, not paintings that scream at you". Obviously he is not alone in his preference. Over the years, he built up an exceptionally devoted following among a number of Irish art collectors, achieving something like cult status. People genuinely love his work.

Nominally, the vast majority of his paintings fall into one of two genres, still life and landscape. In both, however, he always seems mischievously intent on eliminating any hint of drama or pretension. As often as not his landscapes consist of two or three horizontal bands of muted colour: land and sky, or land and sea and sky. When he painted the dangerously cliched motif of the Irish thatched cottage he reduced that, as well, to a pattern of almost abstract oblongs.

Sandymount Strand, which he passed on his way into and out of town, was a famously constant source of inspiration, the Dublin equivalent of the Hudson River. Not surprisingly, he was a fan of Nathaniel Hone's uneventful Malahide landscapes. His still lifes similarly undercut the pretensions of the genre. Usually he painted just simple, flat, individual objects: envelopes, matchbooks, the faces of a bisected piece of fruit, toast, sandwiches, hats, paint boxes.

It is tempting to see, in his continual play on flatness and depth, a wry engagement with Greenberg's theories.

Furthermore, the choice of the most humble, prosaic objects, or the most hackneyed landscape views, as subject matter, together with a diminutive, understated pictorial format, seems like a pointed riposte to the monumental scale and the inclination towards the big statement of mainstream American painting.

IT ALL amounts, in fact, to a distinctive variation of a recognisable Postmodernist strategy aimed at subverting Modernism's perceived grandiosity, and there is a case to be made for viewing Brady as a prescient Postmodernist - and one with a rather good sense of humour at that. But it would be a mistake to see his work as nothing more than an ironic response to Greenbergian aesthetics. There is simply too much that is genuine, distinctive and engaged about his painting to view it as essentially negative and locked into an art-world debate.

The most obvious comparison is with the still lifes of the Italian painter, Giorgio Morandi. Like him, as J. Bowyer Bell wrote, Brady has "created his own private world". Rothko is another point of comparison, and it is easy to think of several contemporary painters from a diversity of backgrounds who have adopted something like Brady's low-key approach, from Luc Tuymans to Maureen Gallace.

During his time as a lecturer at the NCAD and by his example, Brady was a significant influence on several Irish artists, including Pat Harris and James O'Connor. Because he was modest by nature and had a line in self-deprecating humour, it was easy to underestimate the real breadth of his learning, not to notice how subtly observant he was. But then, as many of those who like and collect his paintings already know, it's all there in his work.

The work of Charles Brady is at the RHA, 15 Ely Place, Dublin, from Thursday until March 24th