The band 'Voice'

'Voice' was a band which formed in early 1971 and ran for nearly two years in an occasional fashion. Its lineup was drums (Martin Ditchum then Sam Kelly), added percussion (usually Chris Francis doubling on congas), double and electric bass (George Jensen), piano and Fender Rhodes (Frank Roberts), Vibes (Derek Foster), for a short time a young Laurence Juber on guitar; tenor sax (Dave Mitchel), alto sax (Chris Francis), trumpet (Harry Vince) and usually four or more singers (mostly Maggie Nicols, Julie Driscoll/Tippett, Jenny Tickler, Brian Eley, Roy Tunnicliffe). http://www.allmusic.com lists two musicians, David Nash and Mike Cousin, as members of the band, but I have no memory of them ever playing with us.

Maggie and I were married at the start of Voice and formed the band together. Prior to this I had met Chris at Chelsea School of Art and we began playing together in a quartet called Naima, with George Jensen (who we met listening to the SME in the Little Theatre Club off the Charing Cross Road). Maggie was singing with the SME and we all got talking in what had been Ronnie Scott's Old Place in Gerrard Street, by then a kind of heavy blues club, where you could jam late into the night and a cross section of young musicans collected. Frank, Dave and Martin came from another group of young players, also with occasional links to the Little Theatre set as I remember. The band was a mix of people from a Miles/electronic background, free-ish jazz via Ornette Coleman/Don Cherry and other influences.

We worked from loose music charts, usually begun by me and developed with help from Derek, who was better versed in notation and vocals influenced by the workshops Maggie was running at the Oval House Arts Centre. The aim was to have a parity between the vocal and instrumental voices. It was a large grouping and didn't work constantly because of financial restraints (no-one did it 'for the money...') and the other interests of members. Martin left after a year or so and later worked in 'mainstream' music with many honours; Sam went on to Cymande, one of the very first Black bands to emerge in Britain and then into blues music; George, who had a whole previous career as a rock session player, played with The Amazing Band and others; Frank eventually moved to Denmark where he still plays piano; Derek became what I suppose would be termed a 'classical' composer; Laurence, who only played a couple of gigs, later played with Paul McCartney and in film and TV in the States; Dave became a senior doctor; Chris played across the spectrum, from the jazz band 'Joy' to Adam Ant, carried on painting and teaching music; Julie worked on with Maggie in various groupings, including one also called 'Voice' and groups including the SME and ones with her husband Keith Tippett; Maggie has worked with many free music/feminist groups and runs workshops right up to now; Brian sang with Maggie and Julie in the vocal 'Voice' and is now a graphic designer, especially for television; Roy was a painter and lecturer in Maidstone School of Art but sadly committed suicide; the others I'm not sure about. I stopped playing trumpet soon after Voice to concentrate on politics and painting ...

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.