A Seán McSweeney retrospective contains superlative pictures, with not a predictable mark or a facile gesture between them, writes Aidan Dunne
It's tempting to describe Seán McSweeney as an avuncular presence in Irish art: a stalwart and likeable man who always seems to have been around, quietly helpful of younger colleagues, notably industrious and not remotely as big-headed as many who have achieved considerably less. Tempting, and true, though if anything it sells him short, because he is also a rigorously self-critical painter, and he has produced a daunting number of superlative pictures that inspire enduring affection and admiration among those who own and enjoy them.
In other words, they pass the hardest test of all.
Seán McSweeney - Retrospective, at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo (and travelling on to the Solstice Arts Centre in Navan, Co Meath, and Triskel Arts Centre in Cork) is by no means a comprehensive retrospective, but it does give a flavour of his overall development, and it features a sizeable number of those first-rank paintings.
He was born in 1935 and he emerged from a relatively fruitful period of Irish art in the mid-20th century, when such figures as Patrick Collins and Camille Souter were building on and advancing the achievements of Jack B Yeats and Paul Henry. He was also drawn in some ways to the muted, cubism-influenced work of Nano Reid. He is a representational painter, but one can also discern the acknowledged influence of abstract expressionism in his work, with its commitment to gesture and its feeling for all-over patterning.
Early on in his career, he was described, not uniquely, as a successor to Jack B Yeats, which is at least a partial misidentification, but an understandable one. They both go in for some startling chromatic combinations, for example, though McSweeney doesn't incline towards the acidic palette of the later Yeats. He's more in tune with the middle period. It is true that, like Yeats, he formed a persistent romantic attachment to Sligo in his early years, though he would, strictly speaking, shy away from the word "romantic" in relation to rural life and landscape. Oddly enough, early experience of Sligo was also formative for Patrick Collins.
THE PAINTINGS OF McSweeney's maturity rarely feature figures, while Yeats's generally do. For Yeats, the landscape frames and informs human dramas. At the same time, while we don't see people in McSweeney's work, his is a profoundly human landscape - a place inhabited, worked and known intimately. The layers of human history are there, but he always makes us aware of the scale and immanence of nature, and the pictures are grounded in the horizon of natural forces: the implacable line of the sea, the weather coming in from the west, the wet ground under your feet.
McSweeney was in fact born in Dublin, just off Dorset Street, and grew up there. His father was a Meath man, and his mother was from Sligo. The annual holidays spent with his aunt and uncle in Sligo meant liberation from the constraints of life in Dublin. His father's family were decorative trades people. Included in the show are some of the specialist brushes they used to produce such effects as a woodgrain patterning. McSweeney himself is technically exacting without being a puritan. He has painted with his fingers, with brushes, with conventional palette knives and with less conventional, flexible filling knives, which he seems to particularly like.
He includes some of these implements in a vitrine in the show, as well as his basic palette of primary colours - he mixes his greens and greys from primaries, he explains, and he never uses pure black.
His "greens chart" also features in the show - a grid of mixed green hues and tones that serves as a reference - and sketchbooks filled with drawings and watercolours made at speed out in the landscape.
The oil paintings are made in the studio. Often they look as if they are made at speed as well. You might think that McSweeney is rushing to record a fugitive impression, but in fact he is not. He is a thoughtful painter as well as an instinctive one. It would be more accurate to say that he is trying to convey an experience that includes appearance, in the Impressionist sense of the term, but is not defined by it. In one small painting a triangle of pure blue dances against areas of muted grey. The blue is laid against the grey, but they might almost belong to different paintings - they don't combine in any conventional representational way. Yet the effect captures perfectly the moment when you unexpectedly catch a sheet of water through hills or trees, when your eyes register something but your brain can't quite make sense of what you are seeing.
FOR MCSWEENEY, PAINTING involves excavation and discarding as much as making. Starting with a primed surface that is white, or the natural colour of the canvas or board, "the first thing you do is to break it down until you get to a ground you can work into. You get it to a stage where it's ready to go." Many paintings are made with rhythmic, mostly horizontal strokes of the filling knife, a process that can result in complicated interactions of layered colour. "You keep working it across," as he puts it. "And you know when the wheel is beginning to slow down."
When he was only five years old, his father was killed in an accident at the power station on Pigeon House Road in Dublin. His father was a keen and capable amateur artist, and McSweeney grew up accustomed to the tools and paraphernalia of the studio: brushes and paints, the odour of linseed oil - he still loves the whiff of linseed as he opens the studio door in the mornings, he says. As he recalls it, he more or less bypassed the customary childhood absorption in drawing and went straight to oil paint, though he later attended evening drawing classes at the National College of Art and Design.
His introduction to landscape painting came with visits to the Phoenix Park and to Wicklow. The critic Brian Fallon was critical of the lack of structure in his early painting, and certainly there is in some of them a certain amorphousness, a sense of dissolution, but also an ambitious trying for something, really trying, not being content to settle into "going a little further along a dreary road", as Beckett once put it. This instinct is still there: the sheer, dogged determination not to make a predictable mark. He's always wary of his own facility.
IN 1961 HE met Sheila Murphy and, after they married in 1967, they moved to Co Wicklow, settling near Blessington. Jump ahead to 1984 and they made another important decision, to move to rural Sligo, where they live now. In fact his studio is a former schoolhouse, where his mother and her mother before her would have gone to school. McSweeney is probably best known for the work he has made since 1984, and it is hard to imagine what path his development would have followed if he'd stayed in Wicklow, because there are significant distinctions between the paintings made in the two locations. Not least the fact that, while he still paints dark, nightlight pictures, the Sligo work is much brighter than the Wicklow work. It is brighter in feeling even when not in tonality. When he visited Sligo before moving there, he notes, the paintings he made, such as The White Road to the Sea (1965) or Along the Shore (1979), are dominated by bright yellows. There are sound reasons for the difference. He is a painter who works with the material to hand, and the landscape he inhabited in west Wicklow was very different from the boggy shoreline at Ballyconnell.
First there is the fact that, as he says, in Wicklow the landscape "stands up" in the form of trees and mountains, whereas in Sligo the landscape is flattened by the elements and you look down. In Wicklow the winter closes in, he observes, but in Sligo it opens out. The sea floods in over the fields and the winds are such that "you'd have to hold onto something or be blown away". Sligo has and continues to be an extraordinarily rich source of material for him, including nearby Lissadell, the ever-present, brimming sea and, more than anything perhaps, the ground beneath his feet: the immediate expanse of cutaway bog. Distinctive bogland features have become ever varying pictorial staples. The oblong pools in flooded cuttings, grasses and reeds, bog cotton and irises, all are tracked through the seasons in incisive, closely-argued paintings, with not a predictable mark or a facile gesture between them.
Seán McSweeney: Retrospective is at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, The Mall, Sligo until July 15, the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork from July 20 to Aug 24, and the Solstice Arts Centre in Navan from Sep 6 to Oct 11