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)