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was seen as a progressive movement towards the purification of the visual field, wherein all narrative, literary and historical references were eliminated, in favour of a contemplative art, which celebrates the 'pure', 'innocent' eye.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)
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)
No comments:
Post a Comment