"... 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)
9/15/07
9/14/07
'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.
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)
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)
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