Much abundant landscape painting is predictable. But, as Aidan Dunne discovers, it's possible to take a fresh look at the land.
Think of the word landscape and you're likely to add the word "painting". It can seem as if landscape painting is the default setting for Irish artists. There is an incredible amount of it about. That's not surprising given the strength of the bond Irish people feel for their land. What is surprising is that so much contemporary landscape painting perpetuates the conventions of the picturesque and the romantic even as the actual rural environment has been transformed.
It seems appropriate that for its first commissioned exhibition Co Wicklow's arts centre, The Mermaid, in Bray, has taken landscape as its theme. The curator of From Landscape, artist Jim Savage, invited 28 other artists to make a drawing, not a preparatory drawing but a finished piece, on a large scale, derived from landscape. As a brief, it was both challenging and inviting.
Savage's stipulations had interesting effects in this regard. The practice of drawing is intimately related to landscape, but in a different way to painting. It is obviously bound up with the idea of mapping, of orientation. Not only mapping as an objective, rational enterprise, but also as a means of recording and exploring a subjective relationship with the land. We all build up what geographers term mental maps of our environment, maps that have little in common with those produced by the ordnance survey but which nonetheless provide us with everything we need to find our way around.
Saul Steinberg famously expressed our inevitably self-centred world views in a series of witty drawings. There's a touch of Steinberg to Tim Robinson's contribution to From Landscape, an enlarged manuscript page of doodles and notes in which he muses on "The insane urge to map all the earth and space visible from one's home . . .". And, obsessive map-maker that he is, he should know. Another exhibitor, David Lilburn, a wonderful graphic artist, habitually alludes to map-making in his informal, highly personal accounts of place. His works are repositories of all sorts of information, topographical and anecdotal, in the form of representations, notes, calculations, collage and asides, compendious attempts to remember lost time.
Memory is also central to Arno Kramer's monumental mixed-media drawing, which could be described as a form of emotional mapping, in which an immersion in the atmospherics of place is linked to a meditative state of dreamy melancholy. Dark clouds loom over The Poisoned Glen in Bernadette Kiely's moody charcoal study. There is a sense of water running from the vertiginous slopes to gather in the sodden floor of the glen.
The broken, uneven light of the image derives from a responsiveness to the dynamism of the weather, memorably chronicled in Jill Dennis's observant account of fine details. A quality of urgent, heightened engagement also features in drawings by Nick Miller, Joe Wilson and Jim Sheehy.
THERE'S A STRIKING correspondence between the drawings of the latter two. Both feature rolling, recessive, hilly spaces, packed with visual incident. Fast, jittery marks are the equivalent of fast, jittery glances, eager examinations of the details of place, hungrily absorbed. The liveliness of the work has to do with immediacy of the experience of making it, which also applies to Miller's charting of the distorted strata of Benwee Head, curling around a foreground hollow that plunges down to the surface of the sea, holding us back and leading the eye into the image.
The husbanded terrain of Stephen McKenna's Pool suggests a long history of habitation and use. Equally, Mick O'Dea's fine vertical composition of an urban square framed by the proportions of a window in a Georgian house situate nature within the preserve of culture. For Sean Fingleton and Michael Kane, the agitation of the picture surface seems to reflect inward states. They refer us to the lives of protagonists depicted or implied.
A cooler version of this is going on in Philippa Sutherland's Reservoir with its abruptly edited figure. Most of the story, she implies, is not explicitly told, but is concealed in the picture's emptiness. Richard Slade unfolds the space of his drawing to encompass the novelistic density of DM Thomas's The White Hotel.
No-one fails to rise to the challenge, but among the exceptional responses, Geraldine O'Reilly's view from the lighthouse on Inish Oirr is particularly striking. It's an eloquent, unsentimental testimony to the art of living with nature rather than in opposition to it, which seems so often to be the case in modernity.
The first part of From Landscape is at the Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow, until Apr 13. The second part of the exhibition opens on Apr 18. Tel: 01-2724030. www.mermaidartscentre.ie.