One could be forgiven for thinking a storm is always brewing in the world of Donald Teskey's work. This was true of his early, meticulously crafted realist drawings, and it remains true of many of his latest, boldly gestural paintings at the Rubicon Gallery. In these, winds whip waves into turbulent masses of choppy water and fling them against headlands and harbour walls. Even when the mood is calmer, the hospitable, waterside buildings have the weathered, rugged air of structures made to withstand the elements. They have an exhausted, implacable quality that not even generous splashes of sunlight can soften.
In the exhibition catalogue, John Horne outlines the genesis of these paintings. He and Michelle Clarke invited Teskey and his family to Cape Clear Island in 1998. Their crossing was postponed overnight, and so they stayed in Baltimore while a storm raged. Perhaps this stormy prelude colours Teskey's stirring, vivid accounts of heaving, powerful seas in his Island Crossing paintings, which position us, as viewers, low in the water while the swells tower ominously and the security of land seems remote.
On Cape Clear itself, Teskey is at home in the swooping, indented spaces of the island's harbours and the abrupt falls of the cliff faces. He has always shown a liking for unlikely, vertiginous angles and plunging spatial play. Though initially, and for a long time, he found his pictures in quite a different setting; an urban one.
Born in Co Limerick, he attended Limerick College of Art and Design, and was instantly recognisable as an impressively accomplished student. In early drawings, typically, hunched figures scurried through mean city streets while scraps of paper whirled about them in the wind. There was an oddly enigmatic quality to these apparently straightforward compositions, a hint that more was going on than we might immediately suspect.
What that might be was suggested in a series of circus drawings that came later. Trapeze artistes swung at dizzying heights, a tiger loomed over a woman while she slept. An allegorical interpretation seemed to make sense. These works were about life's balancing acts and dramas. Perhaps the outward turbulence of the earlier city drawings reflected inner states of mind. Other panoramic drawings appeared to chart routes through expanses of the city by night, wild and windswept. Yet the enigmas are never explained, and undoubtedly part of the appeal of the work is that they are not explained. The messages that might be inscribed on those scraps of paper carried aloft by eddies of wind remain unread - but laced with implication.
When Teskey began to paint in earnest, he continued to explore his urban terrain, delighting in the spatial complexity of labyrinthine streets and byways. People in his compositions were usually caught on the hoof, obliquely, on the point of disappearing from sight or glimpsed in the distance. But, as with those map-like drawings, there was always movement, or the promise of movement, of negotiating the spaces he evoked. Even devoid of figures, his urban vistas were scenes just vacated or awaiting the arrival of figures just beyond the frame. It is notable that when, as a proficient draughtsman (he has done a great deal of book illustration), he turned to paint, he never just made coloured drawings. By building his paintings with slabs of pigment, eventually using knives rather than brushes, he forced himself to learn an entirely new language.
BY the time he went to Cape Clear he had already - in terms of his work - been out of the city and had discovered the possibilities of rural landscape. A stay at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, north Mayo (he has been back again since), was important in this regard. He was drawn to the sea cliffs, the precipitous border between land and sea, which have remained a point of fascination for him.
Mayo to the north and west Cork to the south have proved to be extremely productive sites of inspiration, now firmly established in his pictorial vocabulary.
He took to the plunging main street of Castletownshend with delight, relishing the way the town's buildings can be viewed as a jumble of blocks falling all the way down to the sea. But he is equally appreciative of the blank facades - facades that are eloquently blank rather than just blank - of harbour walls and dockside buildings, standing resolutely against the fury of the waves. John Horne refers to the "washed August sky" on the day after the storm that delayed Teskey's visit to Cape Clear, and many of the pictures brilliantly capture that exhausted, after-the-event atmosphere, exemplified in the washed-out, bleached quality of buildings that have been through the worst, and tiredly endure.
This attentiveness to atmosphere animates all of Teskey's work. It is there in the city views as much as in his most elemental land- and seascapes. One way of looking at this is to say his blossoming as a painter within the last decade followed a long apprenticeship in black-and-white. Yet his drawings were complete in themselves and never just preparatory. Rather, Teskey has consistently and incrementally, and impressively, expanded the range of possibilities open to him, in terms of media, subject matter and treatment. And there's no reason to think the process has come to an end.
Donald Teskey's paintings can be seen at the Rubicon Gallery until April 28th.