Nature on a grand scale

In a brief statement accompanying her exhibition at the Ashford Gallery, Gwen O'Dowd notes that the paintings in the show are the final ones in the Uaimh series which first engaged her around 1996. When I mention this conclusive note she immediately winces and smiles. "I wish I hadn't said that, now. I knew I shouldn't have when I saw it in print." In fact, she observes, she is currently working, quite happily, on further Uaimh paintings, destined for her next show in London early next year.

Like all of her work, the Uaimh paintings are related to landscape. Their general format is relatively unvarying: a deep, dark, cavernous centre flanked by rugged, rocky masses. They were inspired by the landscape of the West of Ireland, initially by the coastline of north Mayo. She is, though, distinctly reluctant to pin them down to a specific place. "Once I'd noticed it and started working with it, I could see that kind of imagery all along the west coast. One painting even came from Portugal."

So they are not pictures of places in the conventional sense. "Calling them Uaimh 1, 2, 3 and so on is a way of not calling them Untitled, but for me they are about dealing with space, with depth, in two dimensions, about finding a way into a space." In a way they follow on from her paintings of the Grand Canyon, which evidenced a growing fascination with mass and depth. These in turn were indebted to her work based on Canadian ice fields.

Previously, her work was, arguably, more on the surface, and about a densely worked, richly textured surface. Besides the natural landscape, the Uaimh paintings, with their resonant internal spaces, also recall the forms of passage graves and, sometimes quite strikingly, the body, treated in an epic though sensuous way, with evocations of openings and enveloping, womb-like internal cavities. But O'Dowd never pushes her imagery in any particular representational direction. She has always drawn inspiration from landscape, early on from derelict city walls and, latterly, nature on a grand scale; while "landscape anchors the paintings in some way, and every now and then I feel the need to renew it, by travelling somewhere else or whatever, still, in the end the work has more to do with painting itself than with landscape".

The scale of her recent work in the Ashford is striking - they are big paintings, each in the form of a diptych - and so too is her use of black. Rather than being a blank, impervious blanket, her blacks are extremely subtle and infinitely nuanced. She avoids severe, dead blacks, she points out, like Mars or Ivory. "I use colours like Vine Black, which has the qualities of dark sepia, or Davies Gray, which is a greeny black." With these she builds up velvety soft layers that suggest spaces rather than solidity. "The scale is important because of this sense of space. It had to be on a scale that could accommodate the human presence, to give you a sense of an actual space rather than a picture of a space."

She uses knives, rags and various other unorthodox things to apply paint. Brushes, she says rather guiltily, she employs more to scrape paint off than to put it on: "I get through an awful lot of them that way". That's because there is a lot of scraping off involved in her working method, which involves a painstaking process of building up and scraping away layer after layer of pigment.

"I usually work on several paintings at once, and it's incredibly slow. Not by choice. I just take a long time to do it. I really wish I was a fast painter, I'd love to be a fast painter, but it doesn't work that way for me. The good thing is that, working on a group of pieces, they will all come to a state of resolution at more or less the same time, which is nice."

Gwen O'Dowd's paintings can be seen at the Ashford Gallery at the RHA Gallagher Gallery until November 16th.