Certain painters become associated with particular places and landscapes: Sean McSweeney with the Sligo shoreline, T.P. Flanagan with watery Fermanagh, and Brian Bourke with Connemara, where he lives. A place, as he puts it, "of small rough fields and windblown trees, very rural, with more horses than people." He has ventured further afield over the years, to the olive groves of Andalucia, the farmland of southern Germany, the Swiss Alps, but always it was the rural aspects of these places that interested him.
It's a bit of a surprise, then, to see him embrace one of the most famous urban landscapes in the world in his exuberant new exhibition at the Taylor Galleries. Manhattan Vertigo is an enraptured celebration of New York city. It's an appropriately big exhibition, encompassing a number of wash drawings made on the spot, small mixed media paintings on paper, and a group of large canvases, including some of Bourke's biggest and most ambitious works to date. All of them vividly convey the painter's delight with the surreal lego-land cityscape, with its jumbled grid of blocky high-rises defined by a warm, dancing, vibrant light.
The work is based on several trips to the city, none for longer than a fortnight. It was Richard Ryan, the poet and Irish Ambassador to the UN, who is indirectly responsible for the existence of the paintings. "Richard had gotten us out to Andalucia when he was based in Madrid. He suggested that I might like to do some work in Spain, and he was right. When he was posted to New York he kept saying: You've got to see Manhattan, you'd love it. So eventually I said, rather cheekily, invite us over then, and he did."
Bourke had previously been to Boston and St Louis, but never New York. His first experience of the city was a working trip, accompanying Frankie Gavin, to make recordings with various musicians. Bourke sheepishly owns up to his own role, playing the bodhran, in recordings "along with Venezuelan flute players, Spanish guitarists and various other exotic musical specimens. But it was good to have a purpose, it meant I wasn't just wandering aimlessly around."
What he hadn't anticipated was his reaction to the city. "I was stunned by New York," he says simply. "I know people go on about the buzz, and that was all very well but I found I wasn't really interested in the buzz. . .I'm not that interested in America as such. It was the buildings that really knocked me out. I got a buzz just looking at these things. I was going around with my mouth open all the time." This is why there are no people in the pictures except, that is, for Bourke himself, whose beak-like profile intrudes into several of them. That comes from the way "I was leaning out the window on the twelfth or fourteenth floor, working away, and I suddenly realised how high I was" - inducing the sensation that gives the show its title.
He notches up several firsts. "I'd painted starfighters flying over the woods in southern Germany, because they were there at the time, tearing across the sky all day, every day. But before this I'd never really painted towns, or cities, or even buildings. And cars. I might have painted one or two cars before but not in this way. I looked out the window one day and there was an entire street filled with yellow cabs." They duly feature in one of the big paintings, yellow bugs against black tarmac.
The wash drawings, made in situ, have a wonderful freshness and immediacy, displaying Bourke's exceptional strengths as a draughtsman. His views of the East River have an unexpectedly pastoral quality. "Yes," Bourke agrees, "that's why I finally turned away from the river. I thought it was a bit like painting the country again." All the rest of the work was made back at his studio in Connemara. He worked from the initial drawings and from photographs.
"I surrounded myself with all this stuff. It was the only way to do it, to try and get a sense of it. I've been taking photographs all my life, but this is the first time I've taken good photos, because you just couldn't miss, everywhere you looked there was a picture, as if you were surrounded by Edward Hoppers."
Was he daunted by the problem of how to paint New York? "I wasn't daunted. There has to be a problem to get you interested. Otherwise why bother? It's the technical problem of how to do something that draws you in. But then I don't like solving the technical problems to the detriment of other qualities in the work. If they take over then it just becomes an exercise. There has to be something else. Actually I thought painting Manhattan would lead me into doing abstract paintings." In fact, though they are not quite Sean Scully grids, many of the paintings are, he feels, fairly abstract, certainly for someone so strongly identified as a figurative, representational painter.
A level of abstraction is dramatically evident in the big canvases, in which the buildings are treated as a set of giant, brilliantly coloured building blocks. "That's pretty much how I approached them," Bourke agrees. The colours are beautiful, and often almost edible looking, with buttery yellows, creamy whites, warm pinks and chocolate browns, and, he says, they are on the whole accurate. "There is actually a lot of colour in Manhattan, a surprising amount, and then the light gets it going, so I would say I was pretty faithful to the colour."
The mobility of the light is extraordinary. He generates a great feeling of transient bursts of cloudy sunlight, animating the vast sculpture of the city, so that, though people as such do not figure, the pictures are incredibly alive. When he had decided on going, he read Lorca and Whitman on New York. "Lorca is wonderful on the city. He has this terrific image of the buildings fighting with the clouds, and when I was there it struck me that was very true, that's very much what it is like. Of course you can't always depend on poets. Whitman gets a great sense of the place as well, though not always accurately. I went looking for the Brooklyn Ferry he wrote about, only to find that there is, of course, no such thing as the Brooklyn Ferry."
Manhattan Vertigo by Brian Bourke is at the Taylor Galleries from next Friday until September 23rd
