The Land of Light

There's landscape and there's landscape. Harry Vince Coulter's paintings, currently showing in two exhibitions, one in Tinahely, Co Wicklow, and the other in Castlebar, could be described as landscape - he's quite happy to apply the term himself - but they belie the word's conservative associations.
He is more aligned with those artists, such as John Virtue or David Hockney, who see landscape in terms of dynamic experience. When he titles paintings 'Walking Around Lough Gill' or 'Driving By Mount Leinster', it gives some indication of the kind of approach he takes. Not that he has to be on the move all the time - there's also 'Staring at the Sea, Eastwards' and 'Watching the Yellow Grow Deeper, Hook Peninsula'.
The common denominator is change. Changes in viewpoint as you negotiate the space, and changes over time, as daylight dawns or fades, as the weather shuttles across. The fantastic mobility of the Irish weather, the dramas played out in the skies, particularly on the west coast, must be an important factor in shaping his work. An Icelandic saying could be applied verbatim here: In Ireland we don't have weather, we have examples of weather.
Certainly, what you see in the paintings is change. Their brisk rhythms can set your eyes dancing and skidding around their energised surfaces. Wedges of colour cut in from the sides at angles that knock you off balance. Even when you can more or less get your bearings and pin down water, headland and sky, for example, it's at least as much a question of feeling as of visual resemblance.
Then there's the issue of colour. Vince Coulter used very pure, saturated colour: zinging, punchy, vibrant blues, yellows and reds. They get muddied and knocked down a little when they mix and mingle on the canvas, but they are still pitched rather than the atmospheric greys we habitually associate with Irish landscape.
He's not alone here. Charles Harper and Coilin Murray, to name but two, have adopted a similar brash strategy. People do comment, though, on "the colour thing," as he calls it. "I don't have a problem with it. I know some people do. The fact is that colour and tone in my paintings are far away from realism. Why it's still an issue is a bit of a mystery to me. It's never been a problem on the far side of the Atlantic."
His attitude to colour, which can be summed up in one rhetorical question (why not use it?) is certainly influenced by his art education background in the latter half of the 1960s. The Tinahely show is called 'Returning', and with reason. As he points out, during the 1970s, "I virtually stopped painting for many years." He had studied at the Chelsea School of Art at a high-point in its history. The celebrated English painter John Hoyland, was one of his tutors. Hoyland had been to New York in 1964, and had met the American abstract painters, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Morris Louis.
American colour field painting was a direct influence on Hoyland and on many other artists on this side of the Atlantic, including Vince Coulter. He rates Noland as a particular influence, one still evident in the chevron-shaped motifs that turn up in some of his paintings, as well as in his use of colour and his technique of staining directly into the un-whitened canvas.
Of his earlier phase of activity he says: "Eventually I was making paintings as near to being objects as they could be without becoming conceptual."

Having set out to de-construct painting, he decided that "what it was about was paint itself." With a friend, he devised a way of making paintings that consisted purely of paint, no canvas or other support, using a strong polyvinyl medium. Then, like many other artists in the 1970s, he moved out of painting.
Having worked in computer graphics and other areas, he was prompted to take it up again in the late 1980s. Strangely enough, Irish landscape provided the stimulus though, as he acknowledges, while he was making small, collaged works on paper, he was initially reluctant to call them landscapes. He found it a slow process. "I hadn't stopped thinking about painting, but thinking about it is not the same as painting. It took me about five years to get back onstream, I'd say."
This investment of time is evident in his sureness of touch, the casual precision of his mark-making, evidence of expertise worn lightly.
He found himself drawn to two main regions, Mayo-Sligo and Wicklow-Wexford. He worked partly from photos. "But I never addressed places in terms of single images. This came from talking to people about particular places. If you visit somewhere you see it as a single image, but if you spend time there you know it in a different way. Listening to people describing places they knew well, I became interested in gettign a sense of that familiarity. I'd return to the places over and over in different conditions, at different seasons, at different times." In effect one canvas is a multiple image.
While there is an incredible spaciousness to these images, there is, as he says firmly, "no perspective. The picture plane is always there, which I suppose has to do with my training. The pictures have to do with the mood of a place."
He's wary about the notion of producing composite images, however, even though he still uses collage. "I prefer them to be integral and organic, not cut-and-pasted, which is a technique familiar from computers." It is striking that as someone with a wealth of experience in new technology, he is opting for such a venerable, pre-electronic art form.
"Painting is different. You can do things with it that you cannot otherwise achieve. And the only program you need is the human brain - and experience."

Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, December 11th, 1999

After The Pause

Between the ages of 13 and 14 I discovered poetry, politics, painting and the blues, more or less in that order. Between them they did for any further consistent attention to school, apart from those teachers who could see where I was at, which meant a French teacher who was a poet, two English teachers and, above all, my art teachers, Michael Markham and Christine Rowe, who gave me the use of the art-room as a refuge. At the age of 16 I left school and went to various art schools in London, from 1965 to 1971, the main one being Chelsea. During that time I was also pursuing my other interests as well, which nearly got me thrown out of Chelsea in my second year for non-attendance (I was concurrently attending music classes in other institutions, this was the 1960s after all and education then was more or less free). For a short time after I left Chelsea I shared an ACME (arts collective) studio in Curtain Street with my friend and co-musician Chris Francis, where I painted. But I was more involved in music and music workshops at the same time, in The Oval House with Maggie Nicols, the jazz and free music singer, who was my first wife, (we organised the Oval Music Festival there for a couple of years) and I played jazz trumpet and wrote music, especially with my group, Voice. I was simultaneously involved in Trotskyist politics (beginning in 1963 when I was 14) and then from about 1973 until 1987 my focus shifted to political activism, an all-consuming passion, as those who have been there will know, which meant I painted very sporadically, although for some of that time I worked as an art teacher. From the mid 1980s my political views were on the move, as I was geographically most of that time and by the time I moved back to live in Dublin again in 1990 (I was there for five years in the late 1970s) I knew that painting was what I should have been doing all along, having started again in London in about 1988. At first I was a lecturer and teacher in schools, art colleges and universities in Dublin - up until 1994 - trying to reduce the hours enough to find the space to make my own work, but it was clear that I would have to stop teaching in order to paint regularly. This I was able to do mainly because of the great understanding of my wife and closest friend, Carol Coulter, Irish Times journalist, legal consultant, writer, cultural critic and political thinker.

My work, from the end of the 1980s (when I was still living in London working in an arts workshop for teenagers but visiting Ireland again) through to about 2002, was derived from travelling in, absorbing and working from, the sea and mountain landscapes of Mayo-Sligo and Wicklow-Wexford. I found the landscape cathartic. This was something that just happened to me and was not an 'ideological' choice. If anything, at the beginning of this period, I would have been trying for a more formalist art, looking back to influences rooted in the post-war American tradition, but the fluid character of what I was seeing in Ireland took me at a deeper level and back to the earlier influences of my teenage years. I think the pieces quoted here, from Terry Eagleton, Niamh O'Sullivan and Declan Kiberd, reflect that focus very well, also picking up on the return to the 'art-led' side of my work, not uncommon in someone from my generation, but which I had 'ideologically over-ruled' because of my Marxist politics. I believe the 'art for art's sake' versus 'art is a social construct' argument to be of little use to artists. Art making is a very complex thing, both individual and social and yet neither exclusively. Why I was motivated to take the shapes, moods and textures of landscape as a basis for painting (as opposed to other possible artforms) and how this might refer to other art are, for me as a practitioner, questions to be answered in the work and not so much in verbal analysis.

The works themselves began moving me to different visual concerns in 2003, with references to more linear structures. While I still sporadically work on the long series of 'mountain and bay' paintings started in the 1980s, I have begun to look at the human face and figure as a motif more recently again as well. As long as I can remember, I have painted in series and what I explore in each work is part of a continuum, but not just one series or one continuum and in the end perhaps not one artform.

Reaching Out to Reality

"... A good lyric poet might be lucky enough to dash off a few verses in more or less the time it takes to feel the emotions repeated - but I am sure that this painting is far more an attempt to record with marks what is increasingly a remembered impression and, even in the act of remembering, the impression will change. There will be a terrible temptation for the eye to look beyond the experience to the use that might be made of it - and in that very process the experience will change its meaning - what evolves is a semi-abstract landscape which has the discontinuity of a dream. Harry Vince might well agree with the finest word painter of the Irish landscape, JM Synge, who once said that whatever is profoundest in art is captured when the dreamer is reaching out to reality. These landscapes appear before us in a state of semi-emergence - as if moving towards wakefulness ...
... These paintings belong with post 1960s art - in the sense that they glory in the bright colours made possible by the technological advances of that time - and also by its anti-academic view of landscape ... Our technological culture is still in its infancy - we are the children of the new technological order, hardly in control yet of the new possibilities - one senses in the character of these paintings a longing for even brighter, better techniques ... Most works of art are made possible by one person at one time and in one place - and what is represented in these spaces is the imagination of a radical Englishman in Ireland. He began painting in England, where the landscape was more modulated, but these works have more movement and flow ...
It is as if his landscape is forever changing according to the mood of its observer. This is not mere nature. The subjective consciousness of the viewer produces horizons and many angles of light and shade and the horizon itself changes as you walk towards it in each painting, as in the world ...
These paintings change as the moving shapes of light and shade cause the same spot of land to look utterly fluid from minute to minute, hour to hour ... The paintings really are of folded, folding, landscapes - about how they move and also about what it is like to be a mover through this colourful country of greens and blues. They refer the viewer to a notion of infinity, like the Irish western skies and to that extent evoke something like a sublime feel for the incommunicable ..."

Declan Kiberd, November 1999

(Professor Declan Kiberd lectures in English at University College Dublin and is the author of works on Irish identity, culture and literature)

'Abstraction'

Harry Vince Coulter's extraordinary landscape paintings ... shimmer with an intensity hard to miss among the muted cautious colours of much contemporary Irish landscape painting. Vince Coulter is English in background, a former habitue of Cornish coasts, London art schools and the fervid world of 60s cultural politics: but these swirling, shifting, exuberant creations could, in his own view, have sprung only from the spiritual geography of Ireland. (His) depictions of English landscape have a harder, sharper edge to them, as befits what he sees as a more static scenario; these Irish landscapes, by contrast, are all about flux, dyanism, deliquescence, as jagged coast and solid rock are recomposed in the more merging, soluble media of water and air.
This is not a question of 'abstraction'. If Vince Coulter is a modernist, he is one only in a generous, non-doctrinaire sense of the term. Indeed, these fractured, pulsating paintings are, in his own opinion, perfectly realist. These are real places he has lived among, but ones which have been decomposed and reassembled according to an imaginative rather than material logic. actual space plays a part in these marvellous reinventions, but it is space which has been wrenched apart and relayered, restacked from the horizontal the the vertical, scattered into different pockets, levels and cross-currents. Horizons are scrubbed out, or multiplied and the usual laws of perspective put into suspense, so that we move in a space which appears to face every way at once, and which, like some close-spun textile seems at once dense and infinitely stretchable. This vivid, irregular stuff then spills out over the frame and laps from one canvas to another, so that each painting seems like a snapshot of a potentially limitless process. Here, indeed, lies the 'realism' of Vince Coulter's art, since the Irish landscapes he portrays are unbounded in their continual play of light, sea and cloud. Since their reality is ceaseless change, only this diffuse, perpetually moblile art can be faithful to it. In a sense, it is the weather he is painting, not the scenery.
Though the regions (he) shapes are starkly unpopulated, the human can always be sensed in the intense activism of his craft. In fact (he) is an activist in more senses than one. A few decades back (he) was producing public art for British revolutionary politics and is still involved in political life. But it is Stalinism, not socialism, which restricts politically charged art to a dreary naturalism. Bertolt Brecht, by contrast, recognised that the revolutionary artist needed to deconstruct the world if others were to change it. Harry Vince Coulter's painting is politically significant in exactly this sense - just as there is political meaning in the deliberate daylight it puts between itself and the postmodern art industry. Landscape, lyricism, large-sized canvases, boldly glowing colours: these things may not be exactly a la mode in the art world today. But Vince Coulter works out of an English landscape tradition which has survived through the bleakest artistic times, and his splendid work resonates with a fresh spirit.

Terry Eagleton. 1999

Professor Terry Eagleton was Walton Professor of English at Oxford University, is the author of many works of cultural criticism, plays and other work. He currently teaches at Preston and Notre Dame universities.

In Full Colour

Harry Vince Coulter's latest series of paintings are based on the landscapes of the east coast and they represent the final stages of a series of exhibitions featuring the coastal counties of the east and west coasts of Ireland.
Although engaged with contemporary concerns about the ecology of landscape, Harry's paintings are part of a rich tradition, wherein artists have used landscape to explore ideas about the world - and man's relationship with the world. Harry's work is contemporary in outlook and practice. Contemporary theory argues that landscape is almost better understood as a verb than a noun. It encourages us to think of landscape not as an object to be see, or as text to be read, but as a process by which social identities are formed.
As a result, over the last hundred years, two dominant strands of landscape painting have emerged:
In the formation of the modernist canon, landscape painting was part of what was seen as a progressive movement towards the purification of the visual field, wherein all narrative, literary and historical references were eliminated, in favour of a contemplative art, which celebrates the 'pure', 'innocent' eye.
Post-modernism, on the other hand, decentres the role of painting in favour of a semiotic approach that treats landscape as an allegory. This interpretative mode decodes landscape as a body of determinate signs: it encourages natural features to be read in symbols such as, for example, psychological or political allegories and it links structures and forms with generic and narrative typologies, such as the pastoral or the sublime.
Trained as an artist at Chelsea School of Art in the late 1960s, these cumulative traditions clearly form part of Harry's attavistic memories. But he has filtered such memories through his very own direct experiences and deleveloped his own very distinctive idiom.
Although depopulated Harry's landscapes, nonetheless, presuppose human presence, not only in the form of the occasional trace of a man-made structure, or even in the oresence of the unseen artist, but also in so far as they represent a meeting of nature and culture.
While these paintings are of particular places they are not necessarily topographically specific. Indeed, they are more often composite images of many places. And, although we can occasionally make out the swell of the ocean, the cut stone of harbour walls, the glint of a lighthouse, the contours of a hill ... these are allusive references, barely formed, these are then formalised beyond recognition. Composed from distilled memmories, these paintings are distinctively Irish, but not descriptively so. In colour - much like Sean McSweeney or Jack B Yeats - they are often crepuscular - as much about time as place. But, primordially these paintings are about paintings. They are palpably physical. From thin washes to built-up density of colour the pigment alternately stands high, is stained into the canvas, bleeds from one area into another, or is formally isolated. The canvas is punctuated with pure saturated colour - blues, yellows and reds. Paradoxically, although more abstract than not, these are gestural, even romantic paintings. They are also very dense - composed in zones - the eye is forced to travel, not only from left to right, to penetrate through the multip0le horizons, but up and down, as it takes in the complexities of the landscape, without compromising the essential two-dimensionality of the canvas.
Luminous, irridescent, poetic, this form of painting is very seductive.

Niamh O'Sullivan, May 2001

(Professor O'Sullivan was Head of the Faculty of Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin)

Abridged CV

Born: Southall, Middlesex, West London, 1948

1965-66 Twickenham College of Technology, Middlesex
1966-70 Chelsea School of Art (now part of University of the Arts, London)
1970-71 Hornsey College of Art (now part of Middlesex University)
1977-78 National College of Art and Design, Dublin

More Recent Group Shows

1998 North West Artists, Sligo Art Gallery
1999 Eigse Carlow
1999 North West Artists, Sligo Art Gallery
2000 North West Artists, Sligo Art Gallery
2003 Summer Show, Hallward Gallery, Dublin
2004 Mayo General Hospital
2005 The Grafton Suite, Dublin
2007 Recent Aquisitions, Greyfriars Municipal Gallery, Waterford

Two-Person Shows with Kate McDonagh

2002 Dun Aimhairgin Gallery, Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht, Dublin
2004 Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin

One Person Shows

1999 Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely, County Wicklow
1999 Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, County Mayo
2000 The Space, St Paul's Arts Trust, London
2000 The Bar Council, Dublin
2001 Signal Arts Centre, Bray
2001 Wexford Arts Centre
2001 Mullingar Arts Centre
2004 Hanley's @ The Bar Restaurant, Dublin
2005 Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford
2008 The Bar Council, Dublin

Awards

2000 Arts Council/Aer Lingus Travel Award

Residencies

2006 Cill Rialaig Arts Project

Collections

Environmental Protection Agency; Irish Courts Service; City of Waterford; offices of Gerry Durkan SC; Mullingar Art Centre; The Bar Council of Ireland HQ; collection of Justice John McMenamin and others.